Fresh Air - Best Of: Michael McDonald / The American 'Food Cartel'

Episode Date: May 25, 2024

Grammy-winning musician Michael McDonald looks back on his childhood and his career in a new memoir. He spoke with Tonya Mosley about imposter syndrome and his first band as a tween. Also, investigative journalist and author Eric Schlosser talks about how mergers and acquisitions and very little regulation have all but decimated competition within food systems and supply chains. And Justin Chang reviews Furiosa, the latest film in the Mad Max franchise.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Tanya Mosley with Fresh Air Weekend. It's been said that Michael McDonald's voice is one of a kind. A singular sound that has captivated audiences for generations and has given life to remixes, remakes, and thousands of impressions, from Tonight Show skits to YouTube shorts. Well, in his new memoir, McDonald explores his life, his childhood growing up in Ferguson, Missouri, and overcoming this unrelenting feeling that he was never really that good.

Also, investigative journalist and author Eric Schlosser talks about his recent article for The Atlantic, Do We Really Want a Food Cartel? It explores how mergers and acquisitions and very little regulation have all but decimated competition within food systems and supply chains. And Justin Chang reviews Furiosa, the latest film in the Mad Max franchise. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time, mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. I keep forgetting we're not in love anymore

I keep forgetting things will never be the same again I keep forgetting how you made that so clear I keep forgetting love Every time you're near Every time I see your smile Hear your hello Saying you can only stay a while And I know that it's hard for you

To say the things we both know are true. But tell me, how come I keep forgetting we're not in love anymore? When this single, I Keep Forgetting, by Michael McDonald came out in 1982, it rose to the top of the pop, R&B, and adult contemporary billboard charts. The song is from McDonald's first solo album, If That's What It Takes, and was actually inspired by a 1962 song with the same name by Chuck Jackson. As we learn in a new memoir, Michael McDonald's entire career has been somewhat of a musical nod to both the past and the future, with many of his biggest hits being interpretations or remakes by soul artists of the past. In turn, McDonald's music has unlocked nostalgia for new generations of fans.

Many of his songs have been sampled by hip-hop artists like Warren G. and Nate Dogg's Regulate and the electronic group Maloco's Interpolation, Familiar Feeling. McDonald's new memoir, co-written by comedian Paul Reiser, chronicles McDonald's life and career in music, which goes all the way back to his childhood, tagging along with his father to saloons in St. Louis, where his dad would sometimes perform. As a high school dropout, McDonald writes about his move from the Midwest to Los Angeles, spending his early years as a session musician and becoming a member of two iconic rock bands, Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers, before embarking on a decades-long solo career. The name of his memoir is titled,

What a Fool Believes, named after the Doobie Brothers' 1979 Grammy-winning song. Michael McDonald, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you. Good to be here. Yes. Well, as I told you, I hope I'm not a dork during this interview because I really am a big fan. And the first thing I just want to ask you, why Paul Reiser as a writing partner for this book? Well, Paul and I met at a party years ago and became friends in the years since. And during the pandemic, we talked and he said, you know, why don't you write a book so I can stop asking you all these questions about Steely Dan and Doobie Brothers?

And I said, well, you know, I've thought about it, but I wouldn't know how to start. And mostly I thought, well, how much of a story is here? You know, is this thing going to kind of phase out in the middle of it and, you know, suddenly become apparent to both of us that it's not that great of a story. But he kept encouraging me to go with it and that he thought it was going to be a good story. One of the things that we learn about you as we go through your life chronologically is just how much of an understated view you have of yourself. You're pretty self-deprecating. For a long time, you actually say you felt like an imposter. And I hear that even in talking about this process with Paul Reiser.

You're like, I don't know if I have interesting stories. It surprises me because you're Michael McDonald. Well, that's a double-edged sword right there. And I don't mean to be self-deprecating when I say this, but I never really understood why people gave me so much credit as a musician, especially because I really am just more or less a songwriter who plays a little bit of piano and was kind of put in situations over the years where I had to kind of lean into that a little bit. And only because of that did I actually start to actually try to better myself in that regard.

I was, I think, happy before that to just play in a couple of keys and write songs, you know, with what knowledge I had, you know. Mostly I gained from learning pop music from records and the radio, you know. But it wasn't until I really joined the Doobie Brothers that I really started to feel the responsibility of being the keyboard player, quote unquote, and probably made the greatest strides during that period of time to, you know, kind of better my piano playing a little bit. So I, you know, I did always feel a little like an imposter, like I was, you know, running to catch up, you know, just to keep my job. You stepping into a group and being able to integrate with the group and then form a sound that is unique but

also holds to the foundation of the group. It's kind of the hallmark of what you do and what you have done. Not only did you do this with the Doobie Brothers, but throughout your career, you've been a member of several bands. There was Steely Dan for a time period. But this goes all the way back to your childhood. Your very first group was actually named after you, right? Mike and the Majestics. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, no one knows why that happened. Oh, there has to be a reason. Yeah. Right. My sister named the band, I think. Yeah. But it was Mike and the Majestics, and I soon got demoted, and it was just the Majestics. And how old were you when you guys started this band?

We started when we were all around 12, really. And I think our first gigs happened more like when I was 13, and the other guys were a year and two older than me. What kinds of gigs were you guys doing? And what kind of music were you performing? Well, back then we were playing basement parties, you know, birthday parties for girls we knew, you know, in the eighth grade. And then we graduated to fraternity parties at a very tender age, which my mother was not happy about. And so she enlisted my father to come on as our manager. And not before we were exposed to some of the rites of passage that we were probably too young to witness at these fraternity parties.

Did you realize it at the time? Yeah, we thought we'd died and gone to heaven, really. Because, you know, the girls were all really cute, and the frat guys were out of their minds. And they would pass the hat. That was the other great thing about fraternity parties. We would play them for like 10 bucks. But then we had a curfew because we were all like 12 and 13 years old. And in the course of all this, we learned all the filthy lyrics to Louie Louie and songs like that that were college staples. And we would typically tell them, well, we can play until about 10 o'clock,

then we've got to go home. And they would pass the hat to keep us there. They'd go, oh, play another hour. So we ended up going from $10 to $60. And we thought, oh, my gosh, this show business is fantastic. And for $60 to four kids in the early 60s, that was a lot of money. That bought a lot of Twinkies and Dr. Peppers. So we had a good time doing that.

And we learned a lot of other music. We learned a lot of music that was popular, like I say, to a generation that was just a bit older than us. Because at that time, who were your musical inspirations growing up? Who were the folks you were really into? From a young age, I always had a great admiration for Ray Charles. But, you know, through our exposure to the music of these college fraternities, we started to hear like Marvin Gaye and the Motown stuff and Bobby Bland, you know, Solomon Burke,

songs like that that were just kind of like— Motown and soul artists, yeah. Yeah, the generation before us, but we were all of a sudden introduced to all this great music that we would then endeavor to learn and play for these parties. Your dad was a streetcar driver, also a singer himself, a musician himself, and he really had a great influence on you as a man and as a musician. How would you describe him? My dad was that guy that I always wanted to be, but never really thought I could be. I mean, he was kind of the quintessential charming, handsome Irishman. He had a wicked sense of humor, very dry, very funny guy.

And he was always quick to comment on the irony of life around him and things and people in a very humorous way. And he was just so charming. People loved him. And on top of that, he had a beautiful voice, and he wasn't afraid to use it. He loved to sing. And he hung out in more bars than most drunks I knew, but my dad never took a drink in the time I knew him. He had quit drinking before I was born.

You kind of came to this idea on why. Because it's interesting how he'd spend all his time in these saloons, even take you to them sometimes as a young boy to listen to music? Yeah, he loved being out among them like most Irish people. The pubs were like a central part of his life, you know, saloons in St. Louis. He knew all his favorite piano players. And back in those days, every corner bar usually had a piano player. And they were all very good, you know. They were those kind of people that could sit down and play any song. They had repertoires of 400 songs that they could play in any key. People would go in there to sing, and they would accompany them. And my dad had his

favorite piano players, and he was one of their favorite singers because he actually could sing and they enjoyed accompanying him and people enjoyed listening to him. So he kind of built a reputation in the North St. Louis area as a vocalist. And, you know, when Bob came in the door of whatever saloon it was, it was he was immediately met with, Bob, sing us a song, you know, or the piano players would ask him to come up and sing because they were trying to get rid of some guy who was up there hogging the microphone. If you're just joining us, my guest is Michael McDonald. He's written a new memoir titled What a Fool Believes, which chronicles his life and 50-plus year career as an award-winning musician. He writes about being a high school dropout in Missouri, following his far-fetched dreams to perform, and how he became a member of two of the top

rock bands of the 70s and 80s. We'll continue our conversation after a short break, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. Something you said in your book that I thought was really interesting is that initially, or maybe for a time, you were not aware that the song versions that you were hearing, like of your favorite songs, had been covers by black artists from previous generations. So you were receiving the pop version, and you weren't even aware of it until you started to do your own sort of research as a musician yourself. Yeah, I think that was pretty much the experience of a lot of people in my generation growing up, you know, white kids who thought that Pat Boone wrote Tutti Frutti, you know, I mean, we didn't know any better, you know, because radio was so segregated, as was everything in the United States at the time. It was a sad division in what really

was such a strong part of our culture, you know, but it was always kind of isolated away from and giving credit to the people who really brought that, those art forms to America and really gave America its own true artistic art form, jazz and R&B music and gospel that came from those roots, R&B and gospel. For instance, you know, the English Invasion bands, we thought that they wrote those songs like It's All Over Now by the Rolling Stones was Bobby Womack and his brothers had a group called the Valentinos. And that song was a number one hit on black radio when the Stones released it. Bobby Womack was quoted as saying, I was so depressed when this English band came out with our song

until I got a couple of checks from them. Then I kind of rethought the whole thing. When did you become aware of it, that this was the root of the music you loved? It took a couple years for me to actually really realize that most of the stuff that the Rolling Stones were doing was by Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf and different American blues artists. And that the Beatles were doing Smokey Robinson songs. But I'm still learning to this day, much to my surprise, some of the songs like The Animals Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood is a Nina Simone composition. You know, didn't really enjoy the success of the song that other artists did. One of your iconic songs from your time with the Doobie Brothers is Taking It to the Streets, which was released in 1976.

And you wrote the song and of course, sang it. Let's listen to a little bit. I was raised here in this living hell You don't know my kind in you Well, soon the time will tell You Telling me the things you're gonna do for me I ain't blind and I don't like what I see Taking it to the street

Taking it to the street Taking it to the street No more need for me That was Michael McDonald singing Taking It to the Streets, which he wrote as a member of the Doobie Brothers in 1976. And Michael, those lyrics, they're just so timely, so apt, especially now even. I mean, I just think about what we've been dealing with in our country over the last few years. And I wanted to know, because you're from Ferguson.

And of course, Ferguson was a very different place when you were growing up there, but what were your feelings when Ferguson became the center of unrest? And also you had this song that really speaks to something that had been happening then, and it continues to happen happen and it's happening now. Yeah, on all those points, when I grew up in Ferguson as a kid, it was a product of white flight from the cities. It was this new suburban outside of the inner city. Was that part of why your family moved there? It was, I'm sad to say. You know, I think my grandparents, my grandmother was the only one left of my grandparents at the time,

and we lived below her in a neighborhood that at the time, my earliest memories were like mostly older people whose kids had grown and left, you know, the neighborhood. But what happened, much to our delight, was some kids moved in across the alley. And we immediately were thick as thieves with these kids. The oldest was a boy, and his siblings ranged all the way down to my age and in between. And he was kind of the babysitter. I mean, he looked after his siblings while I think his parents worked.

And he would organize these games in the alley, dodgeball, wiffleball. And it was really in the interest of keeping us all occupied, you know. And I think he saw his responsibility. I got that impression from him even at that age. I had quite a bromance with this guy from the very beginning. And I remember just being totally enamored by this guy, you know, and thinking, God, he's the greatest, you know. And, you know, it wasn't long after that that my grandmother,

I can still remember her asking what we were doing. I said, we're playing with these kids down the alley. They just moved in. How much fun we were having. It was within weeks. The house was up for sale, and we were moving. I learned later that this was the first black family to move into our neighborhood. To my grandmother that somehow signaled that you know

it was time to go the property values were going to suffer and you know blah blah blah whatever people thought in their misguided social strata of such situations. How do you reflect on that I mean just because I'm thinking about your grandmother's choice where she was a woman of her time and so many people like her made those choices to move to this place. It's a hard thing to really wrap your head around. I mean, I became aware of racism, bigotry at a young age because it wasn't long after that that I learned why we moved, you know. And it was part of the realization that the world wasn't such a friendly, warm and fuzzy place. You know, there was racism. There was the atom bomb.

There was, you know, all these things that, you know, the Korean War. And it's like, you know, prior to that, I was only like four or so. Even in my family's struggles, you know, my parents and their struggles, I wasn't that cognizant of it. And the world seemed like a safe place as long as I was with my family. You know, what could be wrong? But I wasn't aware of the world outside. As I became more aware of the world at a young age, that was one of the first things I remember. It was kind of unsettling that all these things, there was all these

restrictions and all these things that happened that I didn't quite understand. Your music is so much like a bridge. I'm going to go back to how black people love you. I swear, I was at an event last night and a song of yours came on and like it always does, you know, the crowd got into it. And I wonder, because you know, you've been a bridge for so long, crossing genres, rock and R&B and soul. Have you ever grappled with though, or felt in any way that what you do, your versions of your songs that have sometimes become hits, that you were appropriating in any way? Or do you feel genuinely like a bridge that has taken in all of what you've i might be appropriating or not genuine or you know i don't think i ever felt like i wasn't being sincere but whether or not i had a right to be for instance when i wrote taken to theets, my first image of the song was I was on my way to a club gig somewhere, and the intro of the song just kind of popped

in my head, and I couldn't wait to get to the gig and set my piano up and pick the chords out on the piano. And I was hoping I didn't forget it, because I thought it just felt like an opening to a gospel song, and I loved gospel music at the time. You know, growing up, I remember I liked rock and roll, too, but nothing was more powerful to me than gospel music. I thought rock and roll was a, you know, close second, but not nearly as emotional and emotive and powerful as gospel music was.

So I guess I was kind of hoping I was writing a gospel song, if you will. And it wasn't until I got a chance to play with those chords, and I started thinking, well, what better motif for that very idea of, you know, people falling through the cracks, you know, our society and what place we have in it, you know, and how do we do it better by each other, you know, than a gospel song, you know. It just seemed like the perfect kind of underpinning for that kind of idea lyrically. And, of course, I couldn't really uh it took me a minute to come up with taking to the streets because and that came from the idea that you

know we've got to be cognizant of this we've got to do better by each other or this is what it's going to come to you know uh it's going to be settled one way or the other you know we're you know these kind of progressive ideas and reforms don't come easily, you know, and they come by necessity. And so the necessity only becomes greater until we, you know, we actually take the action needed, you know.

And so that's what the song was about to me. Like, you know, we're going to meet on the same plane one way or the other. Maybe we can do it out of love for each other and consideration and empathy before we have to do it out of frustration. Well, Michael, I really enjoyed your memoir, and I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much. Well, same here, Tanya. I thank you for your time.

I really appreciate for your time. I really appreciate talking to you. Michael McDonald's new memoir is What a Fool Believes. In 2015, the dystopian action thriller Mad Max Fury Road introduced us to the fierce warrior Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron. Now, the Australian filmmaker George Miller has written and directed a much-anticipated prequel, Furiosa, A Mad Max Saga, starring Anya Taylor-Joy as the young Furiosa. The movie, which also stars Chris Hemsworth, opens this week in theaters.

Our film critic Justin Chang has this review. Nine years after the release of Mad Max Fury Road, it doesn't feel too soon to call it one of the greatest Hollywood action movies ever made. We may have seen all the elements before in previous Mad Max movies, the post-apocalyptic setting and the grief-stricken road warrior caught up in another desert demolition derby. But the director, George Miller, had never mashed them together with this much sustained excitement or sheer verve. One of the movie's most delightful surprises was that Max himself, played by Tom Hardy, wasn't even its best character. That honor

fell to the brilliant and brooding Imperator Furiosa, played by a staggering Charlize Theron in one of her best performances. A character this unforgettable was destined to resurface, and now Miller has given us a prequel called Furiosa, a Mad Max saga. Mad Max himself is nowhere to be seen, though. This is Furiosa's origin story. It begins in a lush oasis called the Green Place, located somewhere in the desert, where Furiosa, a young girl played by Alila Brown, has grown up in a secret society of mostly women. But one day, male marauders on motorcycles invade the Green Place and kidnap Furiosa. Her mother, played by Charlie Fraser, follows in hot pursuit and briefly succeeds in getting her back.

Knowing they will likely be captured again at any moment, Furiosa's mother hands her a seed from their home, the Green Place, and tells her to guard it carefully. Whatever you have to do, however long it takes, promise me you'll find your way home. Plant this seed. Protect the Green Place. Give me this one gift. Promise. Sure enough, tragedy strikes soon after,

leaving Furiosa desperate to not only break free, but also get revenge on her captors. Her chief target is the biker gang's leader, Dementus, played by a swarthily menacing Chris Hemsworth, who seems to relish playing a big personality in something other than a Thor movie for a change. The plot thickens from there. Dementus forges an unholy alliance with the evil warlord Immortan Joe, whom Furiosa will later take on in Fury Road. That film spun a ruthlessly taut and concise story, set over a breathless few days and sustaining extraordinary momentum

from start to finish. The movie Furiosa, by contrast, divides into five chapters, stretched out over more than a decade, and sometimes bogs down in plot. Simply put, Furiosa bides her time, passing herself off as a boy working in Immortan Joe's auto garage. By the time Anya Taylor-Joy steps into the role, Furiosa has grown into an ace mechanic, a skilled driver, and a powerhouse fighter, ready to take on Dementus, Immortan Joe, and anyone else who might stand in her way. This ushers in the movie's most thrilling sequence, in which Furiosa makes her escape from Immortan Joe's citadel by stowing away in a massive truck.

The driver is a man named Praetorian Jack, played by the excellent Tom Burke, with whom Furiosa joins forces. Before long, the truck is attacked, by whom and for what reason, I honestly can't remember, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that we're watching a high-speed chase in a Mad Max movie, and Miller is entirely in his element. As usual, he ramps up the vehicular action to ludicrous extremes, with wildly acrobatic stunts that feel inspired by everything from

Buster Keaton to Looney Tunes. Even in moments when the CGI looks a little obvious, the mayhem is staged and shot with the kind of blissful coherence that you rarely see in a Hollywood blockbuster anymore. As the camera darts in and around the truck, and drumbeats pound on the soundtrack, Furiosa comes fully into her own as an action hero, hurling dynamite one minute, and climbing up on top of the truck to fend off an attacker the next. Taylor Joy has never played a role this physically demanding before, few actors have, and she meets the challenge head-on. For all that, I didn't always buy her as Furiosa, or at least the Furiosa I thought I knew from Fury Road. Taylor Joy has a coolness here that feels very different from the fiery intensity that made Theron's performance so

spectacular. There's something lacking in the script as well. While Furiosa's motivation for revenge is entirely plausible, something about her arc feels a bit too psychologically tidy to grip or disturb you in the way it's supposed to. is the post-apocalyptic world itself, with its burnt orange dunes and towering desert citadels. Miller has said there are more Mad Max movies in store, and part of me hopes he never stops making them. The more he returns to this make-believe landscape, the more real it becomes. Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He recorded his review in between screenings at the Cannes Film Festival. Coming up, investigative journalist and author of Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser, joins us to talk about his latest look at our nation's food systems. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.

Sixteen years after Food, Inc., investigative journalist Eric Schlosser, along with bestselling author Michael Pollan, are back with Food Inc. 2, a sequel to the documentary that sparked a national conversation about the economic, environmental, and health impacts of our industrialized food system. Food Inc. 2 focuses on corporate consolidation, which Schlosser reports gained steam during the pandemic. He's been reporting for years on how a handful of companies now control our nation's food system, stifling competition in ways not seen, he says, since the great trusts and monopolies of the late 1890s. His latest article for The Atlantic titled, Do We Really Want a Food Cartel? delves into how mergers and acquisitions have created a market that is inefficient, barely regulated, unfair, and even dangerous. Schlosser has written several books, including Fast Food Nation, Reefer Madness, and Command and Control.

Eric Schlosser, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me. Well, you and Michael Pollan initially didn't want to do a sequel to Food, Inc. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, we both have written about food and then moved on to other subjects. And, you know, I liked the film Food, Inc. I think it had an impact and I think it was very well done by the director, Robbie Kenner.

And then the pandemic happened. What did you see come out of the pandemic that changed your mind? Well, you know, I was really stunned by how the meatpacking workers of America were being sacrificed in order to keep production going. At the beginning of the pandemic, America's meatpacking plants and prisons were really the vectors for COVID into rural America. And this is when COVID was really deadly. And a public health official in Colorado realized that a big meatpacking plant in Colorado was having a COVID epidemic and trying to prevent the spread into the local community. So he wanted to shut down the plant. And then the meatpacking industry realized we don't want local health officials

shutting down our plants. So they went to the Trump administration and they got the Trump administration to write an executive order, issue an executive order saying basically that local health departments could not shut down meatpacking plants, even if all the workers were getting COVID. And it was remarkable. It was absolutely remarkable how this one industry was able to keep going and sacrifice its poor immigrant workers. And at the same time, there were on television, you know, images of thousands and thousands of hogs being slaughtered and dumped into ditches because they couldn't get them to the right meatpacking plant at the right time. And we just saw how this food system was actually

quite fragile. And it took a shock to the system, like the pandemic, to show how fragile it had become because of how concentrated it had become. And in the control of just a handful of companies. Let's talk about that for a moment and the details on how fragile it has become. So the numbers you lay out in your article and in the documentary are pretty staggering. Four of the largest beef companies control 85% of the market. Only a handful of companies control the cereal market. And the cost to consumer is really interesting because, I mean, Americans are used to fewer choices. I'm thinking about the impact of Walmart on smaller businesses.

The tradeoff was that the prices were cheap. But you write that in reality, we are actually paying more because we have less choice. Can you explain this? wages to the workers, and also what they pay to their suppliers. And in the food system, that would be farmers, ranchers. And if you look at what's happened in the last 40 years in the United States, we've had remarkably stagnant wages for ordinary Americans, and we've had a huge decline in the number of farmers and ranchers. And the middleman is able to take the profit. And that's why you need competitive markets. That's what capitalism is supposed to be about. But what we really have is a form of corporate socialism. And once four companies control about 40% of a market, you don't really have competition anymore because they're able to signal to one another price increases. They're able to signal to one another how much they want

to pay suppliers. A good analogy would be, let's say you want to sell your house. If you're going to sell your house, you want 50 to 60 people really eager to buy it. But if there's only one or maybe two, you're much more likely to get a lower price. And that's what America's farmers and ranchers have now faced in the last 40 years. And it's devastated the countryside as a result. You give an example when it comes to choice of something that, once you lay it out, it's pretty staggering. Supermarkets. Kroger dominates the market, but when we go to the grocery store, we go right down any major city street and we see several grocery stores, we actually think we're looking at different stores with different options. And what you report is that really, that's not true. Right. And, you know, when you go to the supermarket, there are thousands of products, and you think they're independent companies, but they're made by a handful of companies. The Biden administration right now is trying to block the merger of Kroger's and Albertson's. These are the two biggest supermarket chains, but you wouldn't necessarily realize it because they operate under dozens of different names.

So I'm just going to give you some of Kroger's, for example, supermarkets. Ralph's, Dillon's, Smith's, King Soopers, Fry's, QFC, City Market, Owens, J.C., Baker's, Harris Teeter, Pick and Save, Metro Market, Fred Meyer, and then Albertsons, Safeway, Vons, Shaw's, Tom Thumb, United Supermarkets, Pavilions, Cars, King Foods, on and on and on. So you think you have a choice of dozens of different supermarkets, but it's only two. And if this merger is allowed to go through, it'll only be one. One example you give when we walk down the aisles in the grocery store is the choice of coffee. There are rows and rows of coffee, but you're saying that that's really like false choice. Yeah, it's amazing. There's a wonderful new book called Barons about the food industry written by Austin Freerich. And he told me in the book something I had no idea, that there's one company

called JAB Holding Company, and it's controlled by this very secretive family in Germany, the Reimanns, and JAB Holding Company sells more coffee than Starbucks. So JAB owns the following brands, Peet's, Caribou, Campos, Stumptown, and Intelligentsia, Keurig, and Green Mountain Coffee. So you think you're getting these little coffee brands, but more than 80% of the coffee shop sold coffee in America. So much of our identity is actually tied to those different brands, too. We think that we're getting choice, but it's actually a false choice. Yeah. actually a false choice. The title of this article is, Do We Really Want a Food Cartel?, which is pretty provocative because it signifies that these companies are colluding with each other and also agreeing to compete with each other in order to dominate the market. Is that what's

happening right now? And agreeing not to compete? Absolutely. I mean, we had a handful of companies that controlled the American economy in the late 19th century and in the early 20th century. And then we got antitrust. We got trust busters. These big trusts like the Beef Trust that controlled beef all over the United States. And today, the 85% control of the market by the four meatpacking companies today is bigger than the Beef Trust of 1906 when Upton Sinclair was writing. But that was broken up. In the 1970s, the four biggest companies controlled maybe 23%, 25% of the market. And if you were a rancher, you had a competitive marketplace for your cattle. And one of the statistics, you know, one group of statistics that's just, I think, appalling is since the Reagan administration, because it was the Reagan administration that really got rid of active antitrust enforcement. Since the Reagan administration, we've lost half of our cattle ranchers. We've lost 90% or more of our hog farmers

and our dairy farmers. And the rural America is being depopulated. And when you look at a lot of the devastation economically, small communities, you know, losing their stores or even barely existing. And I think a lot of the political extremism in this country is also connected to this sort of monopoly power. We haven't just lost farmers and ranchers, but one of the most outrageous things is what's happened to the minimum wage. I mean, what you're saying here is that farming is an identity. In the documentary, you all spoke to family farmers who say that they not only feel that they're not valued, but corporate farming is killing the entire idea of the family farm, which, I mean, is really tied to our identity.

I think about in Food, Inc., how you pointed out how we see these depictions of farmers on so many products. We have this idea that our food comes directly from these farms in places like Mid-America, but that's not even true anymore. One family farmer said in the doc that we treat food as a commodity. So when you go to these small farming communities, can you just describe what it looks like? What has changed in the last 30, 40, 50 years, not only with their land, but with their communities? Yeah, I mean, the scale has just increased enormously.

I mean, you look at dairy, for example. I mean, you might have had dairy farms with 100 cows, 200 cows. And today you have, and those would have been in places like Wisconsin, Vermont, a place with a lot of rain and a lot of grass, and you'd have grass-fed animals. Today, you have these mega-dairies that have 20,000, 30,000 cows at one facility, and they're in places like Arizona, inland California, and they're not relying on the grass that surrounds the facility.

They're relying on gigantic fields that are being fed by aquifers that are being depleted. It's a nightmare. And when you're getting your carton of milk, you may have a picture of a lovely little dairy farm with a barn, but it's not coming from that place, most likely. It's coming from someplace with 20,000 to 30,000 cows whose waste is not being treated the same way that human waste is treated in cities. And what's terrible, what's really terrible is this country has a great tradition of family farming. And with family farms, there's a multi-generational commitment to the land when it works. And what that means is you're going to take care of the land because your ancestors had it, and then your

offspring are going to have it. And there's something very different about farming from other businesses because this is how we feed ourselves. This is the most important. One of the reasons I wrote Fast Food Nation 20-whatever years ago and why I've been involved in these two documentaries is the food industry is the most important industry. Without food, we can't do anything else. And so instead of having these families with a multi-generational investment in the land,

we have these gigantic corporations that treat the land. If it's profitable to farm it, let's farm it. If it's profitable to put a parking lot and a mall there, let's do that. And once you've drained the aquifer, there may not be any more water coming back into it. Eric, it feels like all of this could have been predicted because if it's directly tied to spurring innovation, having more competition, I mean, that is the American way. We've seen it throughout history. Why is there such a lack of incentive for politicians to do the same within the food industry? Well, there's an enormous amount of money being given by the food industry. The food industry is one of the biggest lobbyists in D.C. You say bigger than the defense lobby.

That's right. And you see again and again how the public interest is being ignored to support private interests. I think if we were to have a poll in the United States, how many people want really safe infant formula and really safe food? 90 plus percent would want safe food. And yet the FDA, you know, when Food Inc., the first one came out, Michael Pollan and I got involved in pushing for reform of the FDA. It was called the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act. And it finally, responsible for our food, hasn't had an increase in employees since 1978. And that's because the government gets controlled by the industries it's supposed to regulate. It's called regulatory capture. And it's a huge problem. And one of the solutions is going to be getting the money out of politics. And corporations are not people in the same way that people are people. And they shouldn't be able to donate millions and millions to political candidates. One of the things that I've heard you talk about is that after Fast Food Nation, the wealthier got smarter. They changed their habits,

and then companies then focused their marketing power towards poorer communities. I want to complicate this a little bit because this is almost two decades ago now, and I want to know what still feels true. How has this been complicated in the last few years now that consumers have become smarter? Sadly, it's just gotten worse. And we really have two food systems right now. We have one food system that didn't really exist so much 25 years ago that is providing healthy, organic, more sustainable food. We've had a real rise in farmers markets, and you can think of chains like Whole Foods that had nowhere near the same influence. And so for people who are wealthy and well-educated and willing to spend the time and have the time to

spend on their food, they really have a new food system, which I think is terrific. But for most Americans, they don't have access to that food system because of the ways in which wages have been stagnant and obesity has just continued to get worse. And now we're seeing that ultra-processed foods, which we address in the documentary, are terrible for you. It's not just obesity, know, obesity, but all kinds of cancers. And about 60% of the food that Americans are now eating are ultra processed. So in many ways, it's gotten worse. Eric Schlosser, thank you so much for this conversation.

Thank you for having me. Investigative journalist and author Eric Schlosser. His latest article for The Atlantic is, Do We Really Want a Food Cartel? Thank you. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Sallet, Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper.

With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.