Eric Schlosser
The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000…. Now our food is coming from enormous assembly lines where the animals and the workers are being abused, and the food has become much more dangerous in ways that are deliberately hidden from us. This isn’t just about what we’re eating. It’s about what we’re allowed to say. What we’re allowed to know.Collection: Animal
The market is a tool, and a useful one. But the worship of this tool is a hollow faith. Far more important than any tool is what you make with it.Collection: Important
Marijuana gives rise to insanity -- not in its users but in the policies directed against it. A nation that sentences the possessor of a single joint to life imprisonment without parole but sets a murderer free after perhaps six years is in the grips of a deep psychosis.Collection: Marijuana
The current fast food that we have is inexpensive when you buy it, but the long-term costs of eating it and the long-term costs to society, are much too high. This cheap food, when you add up all the total costs, is much too expensive.Collection: Long
The United States now has more prison inmates than full-time farmers.Collection: United States
Most fast food is fried. Fried food tastes great, and people dont seem to care about the fat aspect.Collection: People
Future historians, I hope, will consider the American fast food industry a relic of the twentieth century--a set of attitudes, systems, and beliefs that emerged from postwar southern California, that embodied its limitless faith in technology, that quickly spread across the globe, flourished briefly, and then receded, once its true costs became clear and its thinking became obsolete.Collection: Attitude
When you go into a fast food restaurant, you may just think about how good your meal tastes while you're eating it. But you're not thinking about all the consequences that come from that one purchase - the consequences for your body, the consequences for supporting this company and how it's treating it workers, all the way back to the farm where the potatoes were grown, or the ranch where the cattle were raised.Collection: Thinking
I think for real change to happen, it's going to have to come from the kids, the community, the teachers, the parents.Collection: Teacher
If the market does indeed embody the sum of all human wishes, then the secret ones are just as important as the ones that are openly displayed.Collection: Secret
There's been a growing effort to kick soda out of the schools. And governors as different as Arnold Schwarzenegger in California and Mike Huckabee in Arkansas have worked hard to get soda and junk food out of their state schools, which is good.Collection: School
The Golden Arches are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross.Collection: Christian
The industry doesn't want you to know the truth about what you're eating, because if you knew, you might not want to eat it.Collection: Want
Congress should ban advertising that preys upon children, it should stop subsidizing dead-end jobs, it should pass tougher food safety laws, it should protect American workers from serious harm, it should fight against dangerous concentrations of economic power.Collection: Jobs
Kids have no idea when they're drinking soda what they're really drinking, and a lot of them are stunned when they learn that drinking a Big Gulp is like taking a big jar of sugar and just pouring it down. There are 50 teaspoons of sugar in a 64-ounce Big Gulp.Collection: Drinking
We're all connected by the system, and we all have to be a part, I think, of changing it.Collection: Thinking
The executives who run the fast food industry are not bad men. They are businessmen. They will sell free-range, organic, grass-fed hamburgers if you demand it. They will sell whatever sells at a profit.Collection: Running
During my school visits, I really enjoy the feedback I get from them much more than anything I might tell say to them.Collection: School
Point of view is present in anything I write, but I really try to let the subject and facts speak for themselves.Collection: Writing
As an investigative reporter, I'm trying to uncover things and expose them to create a dialogue.Collection: Trying
Today the U.S. government can demand the nation-wide recall of defective softball bats, sneakers, stuffed animals, and foam-rubber toy cows. But it cannot order a meatpacking company to remove contaminated, potentially lethal ground beef from fast food kitchens and supermarket shelves.Collection: Softball
Different people, in good faith, can look at the same fact and interpret it differently. But thats where an interesting conversation begins.Collection: Interesting Conversation
I went into the library and read about fast food and became amazed by all the stuff I didn't know. I learned that there is a whole world behind the counter that, it seemed to me, has been deliberately hidden from the public.Collection: Library
In 1970, Americans spent about $6 billion on fast food; in 2000, they spent more than $110 billion. Americans now spend more money on fast food than on higher education, personal computers, computer software, or new cars. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music—combined.Collection: Book
The life's work of Walt Disney and Ray Kroc had come full-circle, uniting in perfect synergy. McDonald's began to sell its hamburgers and french fries at Disney's theme parks. The ethos of McDonaldland and of Disneyland, never far apart, have finally become one. Now you can buy a Happy Meal at the Happiest Place on Earth.Collection: Mcdonalds
I think there could hardly be a more important subject than health and nutrition.Collection: Thinking
I think two different people can read one of my books and come away with completely different opinions on the subject. I hope they just read from the beginning to the end and be made to think about the subject. Then they can come to their own conclusions.Collection: Book
A public outcry usually masks a private obsession.Collection: Obsession
The obesity epidemic among American children is becoming so bad that I think there's a growing realization across the country that we've got to change what we're feeding our kids and that school may be a really good place to start.Collection: Country
I think it's possible to have food that's healthy, that's good for you to eat, that's also inexpensive. We don't have to have this cheap, unhealthy food being so aggressively promoted.Collection: Thinking
Years ago when I got stuck, I'd start twirling my hair. That's not possible anymore. I can't prove the relationship between writing and hair loss, but I think I pulled out a fair amount trying to work on certain sentences.Collection: Writing
There's also a growing trend toward having gardens in schools to literally show kids where food comes from by having them grow and prepare their own food. There's also a movement that's bringing farmers into schools and creating relationships between local farms and local cafeterias, so that instead of frozen mystery meat, you have fresh produce that's coming from the area that has a name and a face associated with it.Collection: School
I find that one of the most important things, as a writer, is to just show up - to just stay in the chair and fight through the difficult patches. As long as you're at the desk, and you're willing to fight it out, eventually the right words will come.Collection: Fighting
We can have Americans eating affordably and eating in a way that's sustainable.Collection: Way
I really like visiting schools, but what I tell students isn't anywhere near as interesting to me as what they tell me.Collection: School
A typical workday for me is getting up at about 5:00, 5:15 in the morning, getting some coffee or tea as quickly as possible, and then getting to my desk. And ideally, I'll start writing around 5:30, 5:45, and I'll write for three, four hours, and then I'll take a break, and read over what I write. Maybe about lunchtime, I'll go exercise or get out into the day. Then I'll either read over what I wrote the day before and quit work around 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon and spend some time with my kids.Collection: Morning
So for everything I do, I'm very clear about what I'm doing, and I tell people what it's about. They get a sense of what I'm thinking. I don't let people think I'm going to write something in praise in the meatpacking industry, and then they read it and it's actually attacking the meatpacking industry.Collection: Writing
I hate the word "inevitable" because I feel like things don't have to be the way they are.Collection: Hate
The people designing the weapons literally often didn't know how they were being handled in the field by the Air Force - and a lot of people in the Air Force didn't understand some of the dangers. There's a very strong element of madness in this.Collection: Strong
There's a real strong link today between soda consumption and obesity among children.Collection: Strong
Students can do experiments and investigate for themselves what's going on in restaurants, in our food system, and begin a process of learning.Collection: Students
Basically, I'm a perpetual student. I start by finding a subject I really don't know very much, but that I'm curious about. I learn about it through books in a library, by doing interviews with people who know a lot about the subject, and by going out on my own and seeing for myself what's happening.Collection: Book
The federal government has more power to recall a defective stuffed animal who's little glass eye may fall off than to recall contaminated ground beef that could sicken or even kill hundreds if not thousands of people. The meat-packing industry is so powerful that it's managed to prevent the government from having this basic power of recalling a defective product.Collection: Powerful