Eric Schlosser: The Shocking Truth Behind Fast Food and Corporate America

0:02This is a Global Player original podcast.

0:12Hello and welcome to Full Disclosure, a podcast project conceived entirely to let me spend more time with interesting people than I would ever get on the radio. And rarely has that description fitted a guest better than this week's. Eric Schlosser, welcome. Thank you. um here to celebrate if that's the right word the 25th anniversary of your first book fast food nation but a quick word first i think on the extraordinary diversity of your career um i went to see there will be blood the other night at brentford everyman they have a throwback cinema and when the credits came up at the end i saw the name eric schlosser and i thought that's an odd coincidence i'm interviewing someone called eric schlosser next week but it was the same bloke so it was me i plead guilty and then of course on the back of a of fast food nation on the new edition we're reminded of how the san francisco chronicle reviewed it originally comparing you to upton sinclair and and rachel carson so i felt like the kid in the sixth sense it was like all these links were appearing of the uh because upton sinclair of course wrote oil which you opted bought the option for for the film and my connection to there will be blood really came out of fast food Nation because Upton Sinclair wrote a novel that was hugely influential in the States called The Jungle.

1:28And it was about the meatpacking industry. And he really used the meatpacking industry as the symbol of unchecked greed and capitalism at the end of the 19th century, early 20th century. I loved that book. I pay homage to it in Fast Food Nation openly. And also, if you look at the structure of Fast Food Nation, everything leads to the slaughterhouse. And I used the slaughterhouse and the meatpacking industry in America to show what's happened to American capitalism in the 20th century, early 21st century. So when the book came out, I was constantly being asked questions about Upton Sinclair. And I'd read The Jungle at university.

2:09I really didn't know much more about him. And I started reading his books. And Upton Sinclair was a novelist, but he also wrote investigative journalism, and he wrote books on every aspect of American society in the early 20th century. One of his books was a novel about the oil industry, and I just loved it. And it's the only time in my life I've ever read a book and thought, oh my God, this should be a film. So I contacted the estate of Upton Sinclair, and I don't think they'd been contacted about this book in 50 years. It's crazy. And for a minimal sum, I obtained the film rights and I didn't really know what to do with it.

2:55And it turned out that the only other human being I had ever heard of who had read that book was the director, Paul Thomas Anderson. Wow. So he then got in touch and that's the story of my involvement in that film. And I think I'll never buy their film rights to any other book ever again because that just turned out so good. Well, yeah, you'd go out with a 100 % record. That's what I think I'm going to do. Absolute killer. Because you had established a little earlier in your career, having flirted with screenwriting, and you've also written a couple of plays, that film is very much the director's medium.

3:29So it would be the director that brought it to life rather than the screenwriter or the adapter. I worked for an independent film company in New York City, and I had the beginnings of a career as a screenwriter. and I just saw that you should be a director and that the life of a screenwriter could really be unpleasant so I didn't start doing you know this sort of non-fiction journalism until I was in my early 30s and in some ways I wasn't equipped to do it but I just did it and I'm very grateful for the success that I had with it. We'll back up shortly to the journey to that point but before we do that we mentioned just before we sat down this week's edition of private eye founded of course by peter cook and i hope this doesn't offend you but um peter cook in 1961 opened a club called the establishment in soho and and he said it was based on the berlin cabarets of the 1920s which did such a great job of stopping nazism and hitler and it did occur to me that the warnings that are issued in fast food nation at the time 25 years ago many people felt were going to affect signal change to the industry but things are probably worse now than they were then yeah i mean i wrote a new afterword which is like a new chapter for this book uh before its re-release and almost everything has gotten worse people might accuse me of having a large ego or being a megalomaniac, but to expect that my book could change the course of history might have been too much of a weight of expectations.

5:06I think a few things have gotten better in the last 25 years. The way that wealthy and well-educated people are eating now is different. And in the United States, I mean, just to look at the restaurants in London and the interest in food, the television shows about food and the rise of celebrity chefs. And I think there has arisen a new food system, which is for a very select group of people. And my hope is that that food system and the opportunities to have healthy, sustainable, organic, all these good things can become affordable to everybody because the other food system, the highly industrialized food system that's selling ultra-processed food is just continuing to cause enormous harm to ordinary people.

5:58The author will put me in mind slightly of the documentary about the Silicon Valley moguls who don't let their own children anywhere near the products that they profit from, but obviously expect other people's children to have their lives dominated and polluted. I remember reading, and I think this is correct, that President George W. Bush and his wife, flora were eating a lot of organic food while, you know, supporting the big companies that embodied a totally opposite set of values. Well, let's start at the beginning, then you've described your upbringing as stable and privileged. I love that American phrase about being born on third base and thinking you've scored a triple.

6:36Yeah, I don't think anyone could accuse you of that. That was George H.W. Bush. We've got we're really getting around to the Bush's today. um and and uh how would you describe it it was it was a very cultured yeah home life i think my father was a television executive and i was around powerful and well-known people from the earliest days and i was very fortunate in so many ways and one of them is that i was allowed to be nearby as all these conversations were occurring. And I'm grateful to my parents on so many levels. And one of them is that they were very tough on me. I mean, I'm not saying I don't give it off, but they fought against any sense of entitlement.

7:22My father had come from a working class background and he was able to go to Princeton and Yale because he served in the Navy and the government paid for his tuition through something called the GI Bill. So I was raised in a world where I was seeing the powerful, but I was also simultaneously taught not to consider yourself too important in any way. And also to do the work, you know, and that ultimately you're defined by what you do and not how you were born or any of that. But there was a big emphasis on learning and education, I imagine, because there's sort of media and arts milieu. Did you demonstrate early promise?

8:05I presume you did. I did well in school. I mean, so I don't know beyond that. I was successful in that sense. Yeah. The institutional exploitation that typifies much of your post early thirties work from fast food nation onwards. I don't have a sense of an angry young Eric railing against his parents' friends for having too much and not having done much to earn it. No, that really wasn't me. I felt that my grandfather was a painter, and he really came out of an era of the 1920s and 1930s that the artists had a responsibility to society. And the writers who I really admired were writers who got engaged in the great issues of their day.

8:49And having grown up in New York City and in California, I was determined really not to write anything that was set in those places. And through my work, fortunately, I've driven all 50 states. I've really immersed myself in the America between the two coasts. And this sounds amazingly pretentious, but it is really connected to what I've tried to do, which is to try to take people at the margins who the mainstream media ignores and bring them into the mainstream. and you know when I like I said I was I had the beginnings of a career as a screenwriter and when I set out to write non-fiction I really wanted to do a kind of non-fiction that wasn't really being done in a lot in the United States which was an old old-fashioned kind of investigative reporter who uncovered things and if I found if I had an idea for something and I found that someone else had written it, I was delighted because then I could just read it and find out what I wanted to know.

9:56So I really tried to write about things that I thought were important, but weren't being covered. And, uh, you know, if we, if we make a list of my privileges and the ways in which I've been fortunate, I began writing investigative journalism in a golden era of magazines in the United States. The Atlantic, there was an editor, William Whitworth, and he would pay me to spend eight months, nine months investigating a certain subject and then publish articles that were so long. It's beyond belief. I mean, the New Yorker, the New Yorker magazine and the Atlantic, you know at that point we're subsidizing long long form investigations and I think it's still possible and important to do that kind of work it's just so much harder for writers who are coming up today to find a place to get something published at that length and also to get anyone to pay you to do it.

11:01And, you know, it's very concerning because the problems that need to be investigated are, I think, much worse now than when I began in the 1990s, and yet the outlets and the opportunities to investigate them have been so limited. And you see what's happening in the Washington Post right now. We had two great, great newspapers in the States the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Washington Post just fired one third of its journalists. Anyway, I don't want to digress too much on the future of journalism, but there needs to be support for people who want to challenge conventional opinion and kind of investigate those who are in power.

11:46And that's sort of what I set out to try to do. But this isn't a coincidence just to stay in the present day. I mean, this is a conscious effort to close down precisely the kind of work that you do and all the points leading up to it, all the shorter form journalism, all the, you know, holding truth to power, all the simple questions. It is extraordinary to watch from this side of the Atlantic where we've got a heap of our own problems, but to watch the dystopia really begin to unfold in elements of the... And it's incredible how the president of the United States is constantly threatening to sue people.

12:19sue people I mean he's so thin skinned that he's threatening to constantly threatening to sue late night comedians I mean it's just it's remarkable but it applies as well to journalism because for every person he threatens to sue there are 10 or 20 people who are afraid of being sued it's sort of there's an implied threat that if you challenge the way things are there are going to be consequences for you as the BBC is learning at the moment and you're right that's a rock that he lobs into a pond and you don't know where the ripples end up but people will find themselves self-censoring and so yeah editing when then for you did that writing bug first appear before you knew what kind of writing would satisfy you the most or bring you the most success which I think the first is a much bigger consideration than you for the second but the actual writing bug were you in school when I was in school when I was perhaps 12, 13, 14 years old.

13:17I just always wanted to be a writer. And you mentioned, you know, that I've done different kinds of writing. I really came to see that there's no one form of writing that's better than any other. You know, the traditional hierarchy would be like the poets at the top and the novelists below them and the playwrights below them and somewhere at the bottom would be journalists, you know. And I don't think that's true. it's really hard to do i've found it's so hard to do something good and there's no one way and and in the states at least there is this tradition that emerged in the 60s and 70s that writing journal that certain journalism and writing non-fiction was equal to any other kind of writing and i'm very grateful for any assignment that i get that is about something i care about and you could ride that wave i mean timing wise being born in i think in 59 as you were coming to consciousness really and developing this ambition you could see that the kind of work you've ended up doing achieving a greater status than it had ever really had before

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15:13So school, then Princeton and then Oxford. You came here for a while to study at Oxford. And if I'd met you at Oxford then and said, what kind of writer are you going to be, what would you have said? I was an aspiring playwright. You were? Yeah. Did you put plays on at university? I was involved in plays at university, yeah. and again you know the the writer who i admired the most was arthur miller yeah and that sort of and i i i have less than zero acting ability and when friends of mine who are actors who want me to read for them for an audition i think i'm i kill any possibility but i had friends who are actors or aspiring actors and you know what i'm doing with you right now would have been inconceivable to me in my early life because I had the ambition to be the writer in the back of the theater in the dark and have my friends who were actors on stage reading the lines I had no desire whatsoever to have a public persona to you know have do this kind of interview and again it gets back to like almost a weird existentialist ethic which it's in the work the work needs to speak for itself.

16:27And the writer who Paul Thomas Anderson's been adapting, Thomas Pynchon, I mean, I really admire him. No one knows what he looks like. You know, he doesn't give interviews. Maybe it's a nom de plume, and maybe it's not even his real name, but it's what's on the page that matters most. And I mean, I could just go on about this. I mean, I've come to know once I got success you know as a writer I got to know some other successful writers and some of them are horrible they're horrible people yeah they're plagiarizing I know who they're ripping off they have enormous conventional success and ultimately none of that matters because what really matters is in the work yeah yeah when did that well it didn't change really until great success came so so you've had profile thrust upon you rather than having sought it or achieved it yeah and i'm not whining i mean no i know you're not i'm not i'm not complaining about it you know i really again you know i just never wanted to be a writer who was identified by a certain outfit you know or or had this i think again getting back to celebrity the need for for renown or celebrity as a writer i think doing this sort of thing is extremely useful I mean, aside from trying to get people to read my books, you know, probably for this sort of thing, more people will hear me talking about the issues that we talk about than we'll read the book.

18:01And I have been I haven't written my memoir. I'm not planning to write it, but I'm writing about issues I think are really important, not just for me, but for other people. So doing this sort of interview, you know, is useful for getting people to try to pay attention. And again, I'm not at all complaining that you were interested to talk to me. Thank you. It's my pleasure. So where's the fork then? Because you had a play produced in 1985. You'd have been about 26. You know, I wrote the play. I wrote the play in 1985. Right. And it wasn't produced until 2003. Oh, I didn't know that. And it was produced here in London.

18:44and it's a play that was about American empire, really light, cheerful, funny thing. Musical comedy. And it came very, very, very, very close to being produced in a great theater in New York City and then it wasn't and I forgot about it. I put it in a drawer. Wow. And then after 9-11, I really started thinking about it because there was imagery in the play that was very similar to the destruction of the World Trade Centers. And I went down, I grew up in New York City partly, and I rode my bicycle down to the World Trade Centers right after they collapsed. So I saw it close up, and I saw the effort to rescue people.

19:32And one of the images that is forever burned in my brain is hundreds of hospital cots and huge sort of medical centers that they'd set up to kind of help the victims. And they were all empty because either people ran away from those towers or they died in those towers. So anyway, I thought of this play and I reached out. I read, I think, because I'd spent time in England. I read in the New Statesman, it might have been, that this director, Dominic Dromgoole, was looking for plays that were connected to the moment. I'd never met him. I just sent him this play. And he read it and produced it at the Arcola Theater here.

20:18And it was an extraordinary life experience because the play had been written 20, not 20, I'm doing my math, 16 years earlier. it was about the American empire and it was produced in London right when George Bush was coming here at the height of the Iraq war so it was a great theatrical experience my other play that I wrote was produced at Shakespeare's Globe on a gigantic scale with 20 actors and a horse and honestly I think it got the worst reviews of any play produced on that spot in 400 years whereas my first one got great reviews The second one got horrible reviews, and I think some of the British critics were very happy to just take me down a few notches in any event.

21:05What happened then between finishing Americans and putting it in a drawer and starting work on Fast Food Nation? That seems to be the big pivot in your process. So I lived in rural Vermont. I tried to be a novelist. I was a remarkably unsuccessful novelist. For a while, I drove a truck and delivered food to the poor and senior citizens. And I loved driving a truck. It's actually a useful skill that I have. I never hit anybody. And I had to do an enormous amount of manual labor because I was delivering very, very heavy boxes. And it got me into really good shape. But it just didn't seem sustainable.

21:54as a career path for me. And so I went to New York City. I got a job at an independent film company through a cousin of mine was dating someone who worked there. I got a job, and I started out as a script reader. So I was reading literally dozens of screenplays a week, and then I was more of a story editor, and then I got commissioned to write a screenplay. and I spent about six or seven months investigating the Asian gang milieu of New York City to write a screenplay about the trafficking of Asian immigrants and how the Asian gangs were managing that. I had a co-writer who was a former Asian gang leader and he was brilliant, but he had dropped out of school when he was about 13 and we teamed up on it And it never got produced, but I just saw what happens to, you know, well-intended scripts can turn into, you know, musicals about Asian gangs or something like that.

23:02So at that point, there was an editor at The Atlantic named Colin Murphy, and he read through the slush pile every week. The slush pile would be, and it was very unusual for a high-level editor like that to do it. writers would send ideas for articles to the magazine and once a week he would sit down and read through you know unknown writers sending in these ideas so i had an idea for an article and this is in the pre-email age and um i got a response a one sentence response which said no thanks but try again which to me was amazing because i had no background as a journalist and um and so i tried again i sent another idea they commissioned me to write the article they ran it and on the basis of that article they gave me a big assignment and i spent almost a year on it and i quit my day job and that was 1994 maybe and since then i've just been doing you know mainly long-form investigative journalism which I never went to school for or anything but I care deeply about and and you'd had enough I don't want to say false starts or failures but enough experience to know that this really fitted you oh my gosh I mean it was it was amazing and it it was an amazing opportunity that was given to me uh and i and colin murphy just had a pivotal role in my writing career and he there are a number of other successful american writers who he just plucked out of the slush pot i've got an image of the opening scenes of there will be blood he's prospecting yeah right he's literally sifting through shit looking for but but what i so admire about it is he's not looking at anyone's CVs.

25:02He's not asking for clippings. He's simply reading the writing on the page and deciding who he wants to give an assignment to. And again, that sort of thing is so much more difficult right now for writers to... It's the opposite of an algorithm, what you've just described. It's instinct, isn't it? It's the total opposite of an algorithm. And I'm not a Luddite. Sure. I use computers constantly and all these databases are so useful to my work. But I fight against and resist and resent the notion of the algorithm. And you're right on the mark. Absolutely right. Was it already thematic, your work?

25:46Were you already finding yourself drawn more to tales of exploitation and negligence and oligarchy almost? Were you already drawn to it? As a person, I was just concerned with what was happening in the United States. And, you know, again, in the 90s was a great flourishing of celebrity journalism. And there was a magazine, Vanity Fair, that had been reborn. and it was all about celebrity, and a lot of the writing was about the writer themselves and their own, and someone like Hunter Thompson did it the best of anyone, and Hunter Thompson was writing about himself so much that it even was no longer about him.

26:31It was about the craziness of American society. So I just decided to go in a different direction and to have the subject matter so much more important than me. and if you read my work, I do appear a few times maybe, but only when it's really important. Like when in Fast Food Nation, I went into a slaughterhouse as a worker and I never, at the time I was worried about being sued, but I can talk about it now. I haven't really spoken about it, but it's occurring to me. I was writing about meatpacking workers and I felt like I needed to see for myself what their job was like. So someone in the plant helped me out and I went into the slaughterhouse as a worker named Jose Morales.

27:16And I don't speak any Spanish, which is pathetic because so much of my work has been focused on undocumented Spanish-speaking migrants in the United States. But none of the supervisors spoke Spanish. And, you know, it took me into this central metaphor of my book. And I felt like it was important not only that I do it, But in that section of the book, I use the word I. It's like, what am I seeing? I've got step by step what I see. But from 99 % of what I'm writing, it's not about me. Can we talk briefly about that? Just because of that contrast for people who haven't read Fast Food Nation and hopefully will as a consequence of listening to this.

28:02Because you said something that surprised me a moment ago about when you were driving a truck and the hard physical labor got you into good shape. and the men that you encounter when you're working in in meatpacking they were falling apart in front of your eyes in some cases that the but so so what what was the difference between those two types of hard physical labor one that could build you up and the other that could have there's a there's a there's a character who describes himself as having no body parts left at one point everything's broken well the similarities between driving a truck and delivering boxes heavy boxes and working in a meatpacking plant is that they're both manual labor.

28:39But I had total control over how I lifted. I was conscious of how I was lifting, you know, and I didn't get hurt and I got in good shape. In the slaughterhouse, you know, most people don't realize in a beef slaughterhouse that almost all of the work is done by hand because, you know, in a poultry slaughterhouse, the chickens are almost identical in size and the same is true in a modern hog slaughterhouse so they can have a lot of equipment that you know was is able to slice in an automated way things that are of a standardized size in a beef slaughterhouse the cattle vary enormously in size so most of the work is done by hand so you have hundreds of workers standing very closely together with very sharp knives.

29:28And it's just, it's brutal work. And the list of injuries that you can get in a slaughterhouse is lengthy because it's an assembly line. It's actually a disassembly line. Something very big is being reduced into some very small parts. And the speed of the line helps to determine the amount of profit that that company will make that day. Because once they've got 300 workers standing ready to go, the more meat they can ship out the door, the more money they'll make. And there is a direct relationship between how fast the line is going and how many people get hurt. So one of the big debates in the United States is the companies are constantly trying to speed up production.

30:17And people who care about meatpacking workers are constantly, either through unions or through legislation put restrictions on how fast the line can move. And it's entirely, I mean, if you've described it, it's entirely dehumanizing. They are units of production. They're not people or souls. And the cleaner who lost two fingers and was back at work a week later and told, use your other hand. Right. And, you know, we started this conversation with Upton Sinclair. And now we're back there. What's unbelievable is Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle in 1906. and in 2026, there are passages of his novel describing the dangers of the work that could have been written yesterday.

31:00I mean, so many of the same sorts of injuries, so many of the same sorts of tactics by the big meatpacking companies about how to avoid paying workers who've been injured. And there's a real sense that these people are disposable. And it's also really important to add at this point that most of them are immigrants. A large proportion of them are undocumented immigrants. And that's the ideal workforce because not only do they have a work ethic and they're manual laborers, but also because they're in a position where they're unlikely to complain and where a company can threaten them in all kinds of ways that you couldn't threaten an American citizen.

31:38We are one of our insane newspapers had carried an opinion piece two days ago under the headline, the industrial revolution would be illegal now. And you're supposed to think that was a bad thing. You're supposed to very right. So you're describing, as you say, what practices that are defined entirely by profit and human injury is a. Right. And one thing, again, in the afterword of this book that just blew my mind is while researching Fast Food Nation, I spent time in slaughterhouse communities in Washington State, Colorado, Nebraska, and Texas. I spent a lot of time with meatpacking workers, hundreds of workers, workers who'd been injured in every conceivable way, with union officials, with attorneys who represent meatpacking workers, and with activists who are trying to organize immigrant workers and protect them.

32:36And in all that time, I never heard one story about child labor. Not one. I heard horrible stories of sexual harassment on the job, even of rape on the job, of people losing arms, horrible things. and as I write about in the afterword right now, child labor has become endemic in American meatpacking plants. Not one case, but multiple cases of child labor in multiple states and getting back to the Industrial Revolution, you know, if you're going to celebrate the origins of the Industrial Revolution, you should celebrate child labor, the six or seven day work week. Up the chimneys. Yeah, right. All of it.

33:18Yeah. um well you do talk a different sort of child labor what is hard to convey to people who haven't read the book is and and we're doing a decent job of it now is is that it is not just about what we put into our bodies it's about every single corrupt stage in every single part of the process yeah and and even the children or at least the young people whose lives are being robbed by the hours that they're working because they're not studying when they should be studying because they need the subsistence wages to help their family and i mean every single level of it with these enormous amounts of money being spewed out of the bottom of the process to a tiny number of people every single level of it is utterly utterly corrupt what was the original seed when when did you realize that this was more than an article this was at least a book well rolling stone had called me in and asked me to write about fast food and go behind the counter and find where this food came from and i didn't accept the assignment initially they didn't really know what they wanted they just wanted to know where fast food came from and i would go to mcdonald's i mean not three times a week but on the road and so much of my time is spent you know on the road in the United States, and I liked the food, and I didn't want to write something that was condescending towards the fast food that most people eat, and I ate the food too.

34:49I mean, I went to Kentucky Fried Chicken, and my diet was not perfect and pure. So I told him I'd think about it, and I went into the library, and I started reading about the fast food industry, and that's when I realized, my God, this industry has become so powerful in a very brief period of time, it has transformed the food that we eat in a very brief period of time through the industrialization of the food system. And this is occurring over a couple of decades, a few decades. And then, you know, ultimately what made me do it is I found that it would be a good way to look at the changes in my country in my lifetime and changes that were very upsetting to me.