The Press Box - Eric Schlosser on the 20th Anniversary of 'Fast Food Nation'

Episode Date: October 1, 2021

Bryan is joined by journalist and author Eric Schlosser to discuss the 20th anniversary of his book ‘Fast Food Nation.’ They talk through the process of turning his magazine story into a book (2:49), discuss what it was like reporting on the fast food industry from talking to the founder of Carl's Jr. to going undercover at a slaughterhouse (30:20), and then consider how this book has aged 20 years later (1:00:35). Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Eric Schlosser Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Emmy Award-winning producer, actor and comedian Larry Wilmore is back on the air, hosting a podcast where he weighs in on the issues of the week and interviews guests in the world of politics, entertainment, culture, sports, and beyond. Check out Larry Wilmore, Black on the Air on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to the Pressbox podcast. Brian Curtis of The Ringer here along with producer Erica Servantes. Now, if you listen to this podcast, you know how much I love to revisit.

it the writing of great books, which for me means great nonfiction books. We did a show on John Crackauer's End of the Wild, we did a show on David Halberstams, The Breaks of the Game. For today, I picked another favorite, Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, the Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Fast Food Nation was published 20 years ago, which qualifies as a peg, as we say in journalism. But what makes the book so powerful to me is that it always seems to have a peg. When Eric paid a secret visit to a slaughterhouse two decades ago, he noticed how close-packed workers could accidentally stab each other with long knives they used to cut the meat. Well, during the pandemic, these same workers were spreading a deadly virus.

I thought about Eric's book when I read that story. I wish I thought about it more every time I pull into a McDonald's drive-thru in order of burger. Like Into the Wild, Fast Food Nation began as a magazine story. And like Into the Wild, the story wasn't Eric's idea. came from an editor named Will Dana. Eric delivered a two-part series for the magazine, the first installment of which ran in the September 2nd, 1998 issue of Rolling Stone.

Now, the date is notable because in the late 90s, late in the year, issues of Rolling Stone were stuffed with the ads, which allowed editors to run those battleships of investigative journalism. The issue had a photo of Shania Twain on the cover with Baird Midriff.

That was the mix back in the day. The book, Fast Food Nation, followed in 2001, timing there is significant too. The Clinton years left lots of liberals disillusioned. George W. Bush had just been elected president. The same year, in fact, would give us another superb piece of muckraking, Barbara Aaron Reich's nickel and dived. Now, if you haven't read a fast food nation, or if it's been a while, I'll make two arguments for it. One is the way Schlaaser reports and uses facts. You'll hear him talk about that. The second argument I'd make for Fast Food Nation

is as a piece of writing. McDonald's has never served a burger as lean as an Eric Schlosser sentence. When you read him, it feels like he's pruned every sentence of unnecessary adjectives or anything overly fancy. In fact, the most famous sentence in Fast Food Nation, my personal favorite is there's shit in the meat. That's some good shit. Here's Eric Schlosser on Fast Food Nation.

All right, Eric, I'd love to get started by getting a sense of your career before you got the assignment that became Fast Food Nation. You're a magazine writer. Yeah. What kind of magazine stories did you write? You know, I was really fortunate. I started out as a playwright and a screenwriter, and I fell into doing nonfiction writing.

I wasn't really published as a writer until my early 30s. And the editors of the Atlantic Monthly, Bill Whitworth and Colin Murphy, were really my mentors. And I had no clippings or anything like that, but Colin Murphy still read through the slush pile every week, which was unsolicited ideas for articles. And I sent him an idea for an article. And I got a one-line sentence back,

which was, no thanks, try again. I tried again. They published an article of mine, which was on the New York Police Department bomb squad. I went on duty with a bomb squad for a week. And that led to a big assignment, which was to look at the war on drugs in the United States through the war in marijuana and mandatory minimum sentences.

And so, you know, I was basically writing for the Atlantic. And before I did Fast Food Nation for Rolling Stone. These are articles with big lead times. Big lead times. Big lead times. And I mean, part of that was my fault because I get really interesting. I dig deeper and dig deeper. And what was supposed to be a little article would turn into a,

a massive article, but I was always working closely with the editor to do it. And, I mean, again, I feel like I'm talking about the late 19th century, but this was a time when some editors would give you money to keep you working on a piece. So, you know, I mean, I didn't make a fortune doing it, but I earned some decent money working eight months, nine months, ten months on one article. And I did these massive investigative pieces. And I was just so fortunate that I was supported in doing it by these magazine editors who cared about the subject. And, you know, I worked very closely with them.

It's not as though I said, here, I'm going to hand you 3,000 words. And then a year later, I gave them 100,000. I mean, I would keep them informed about what I was doing every step of the way. And for people who came of age after the magazine era, just, will you just explain what mean by them kicking you some money while you're working on the article? Well, again, I feel like, you know, we're talking about the 19th century, but Bill Whitworth and I, Bill Whitworth was the editor of the Atlantic Monthly. I didn't even have a contract. Everything was done basically through a handshake, and I never even got a contract until the thing

was about to be published. We would talk about, do I need more money? He'd send me more money. and then, you know, once there was a better sense of how long it was going to be, you know, I'd get a sense of how much I'd be paid and it was enough to work on it. I mean, again, it wasn't like writing a screenplay for a big film or something like that, but it was a nice five-figure sum to keep me going and keep me writing. Your dad was an executive at NBC when you're growing up later, the president of NBC. Yes. And I read you say one time that because of that, you avoided writing about famous people,

which is the motivation for so much journalism. What's it like to be Tiger Woods? What's it like to be a United States Center? You were not interested in that. Yeah, I mean, you know, my dad passed away a month ago, and I admired him more than any man I've ever met. He was just a good man. And I grew up in a world of celebrities from the time I was a little kid.

And I grew up around power and celebrity. And very early on, I got this education of, you know, it sounds so corny and cliche, but what's important and what's not important. And so I had no interest in writing about celebrity and really set out to write about subjects and write about people in places that the mainstream media was ignoring. So, you know, I'm trying to think. I don't think I've ever written anything except for the bomb squad piece. We went on duty with the NYPD, but I don't really write about New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco.

You know, the war on drugs piece was set in rural Indiana. I wrote about California, but I wrote about the exploitation of migrant farm workers, which took me to all these towns in California that most people never visit. I wrote a big piece on prisons that's taking me a long time to turn into a book. But I feel like having grown up around the mainstream media that I was just determined to tell the kinds of stories that weren't being told. That's what I set out to do. So you've written these pieces for the Atlantic. Then Will Dana, an editor Rolling Stone, comes to you and proposes what?

Well, I had written a long piece for the Atlantic in which I followed the harvest in the strawberry industry. I'd spent almost a year with migrant farm workers as the harvest moved from San Diego County up to Mallory County. And the book was ostensibly about strawberry. The article was ostensibly about strawberries, but what it really was about was about how migrant farm workers are being exploited. And it was about attitudes towards undocumented immigrants because at that point in California, the governor of California, Pete Wilson, was demonizing undocumented people in the state of California saying that they were welfare cheats and parasites and coming to California to live off of taxpayers. And the reality was they were propping up what was at the time the biggest sector of the California economy,

which was agriculture. And every single strawberry that you see in the supermarket, fresh strawberry, has to be carefully picked by hand. And if you want a lot of strawberries, you need a lot of hands. So there were a lot of complex subjects, you know, farm labor economics, undocumented immigration, history of farm labor, and it was all told through something very simple and concrete,

a strawberry. And, you know, from what Will Dana told me later that he had read the Atlantic piece on strawberries. And, you know, when I went into the office, he said that he wanted me to do for fast food what I had done for strawberries, which would show this whole world and this whole system that we never see that's hidden. And he had a title for the piece, which was Fast Food Nation. And, you know, in retrospect, that's a great fucking title. But at the time, you know, I just, I wasn't sure if I wanted to write it because I was on the road a lot.

I went to McDonald's. I like hamburgers and french fries. I'm not a foodie. I didn't want to write something that was kind of like the snobbish, elitist put down of the food that most Americans eat because I like KFC. I like McDonald's, you know. And so he didn't know where the story was, except he was curious what goes on beyond the counter.

And I didn't really know what it was. So I said, I'd think about it. And I went to, again, this is like the 19th century. I went to where all my articles at that point were beginning, which was the New York Public Library. And I just started reading everything I could about fast food. And, you know, the story became clear, which was the food we eat had been transformed, you know, in a remarkably brief period of time into industrial commodities. And that a handful of corporations were getting control of our food supply.

And it was having huge impact for anyone who eats the food, but also for the workers and also for the communities, a kind of concentration of power and homogenization of America. So it got interesting. And as it got interesting, it got bigger and bigger and longer and longer. And I give Will and Jan Winter, who was the editor of Rolling Stone at the time, enormous credit because they not only supported me in writing. this massive piece, but they never asked me to tone it down. They wanted to make sure by fact-checking it that it was accurate, but there was no pressure on me to not criticize McDonald's or not criticize the beef industry. And Oprah Winfrey had recently criticized the beef industry and been sued. And anyway, so that's how it wound up in Rolling Stone.

Now you say massive piece, it winds up running in two parts. Was it intended after you've done some reading and seeing the potential of it to be a massive story as big as it wound up being? You know, I just got deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper into it, and it got longer and longer and longer. I didn't know if it would run in one issue. I didn't know if it would run in two. And quite honestly, you know, will Dana, none of my editors ever read anything until the last word is written? So they know it would be long, but they didn't know if it would be good. So if it sucked, it wouldn't have been long. It would have been hugely reedited and cut down.

And so, you know, you just never know. You just never know until it's done. So you're sitting in the public library and what kinds of things are you reading? You know, I start out, and this is for everything, I start out with really general broad studies, you know, or books on a subject. And then I, in terms of fast food, I started reading the memoirs of the founders of the industry. I started reading academic texts on food processing and academic texts on the meat industry. And then going through the bibliographies and reading, you know, trade journal articles and just trying to get a really good sense of the subject. And, you know, my process has always been to learn as much as I can,

about a subject before I ever do any interviews, because it's just so much more interesting to interview someone when you kind of know something about the subject, as opposed to just calling them up and you don't know anything about it. It's sort of a waste of time. So anyway, my process for all the things that I write is start with a broad general literature,

narrow it down to the specialist literature, learn as much as I humanly can learn and then go into the world and try to see if the reality outside my office or outside the library corresponds to what the book learning or reading has told me. And I'm really grateful for the work I've had because, again, you can't control

whether it's good, ultimately, I mean, if other people are going to like it and you can't control if the market is going to go for it. But the life experiences that I've had doing this kind of nonfiction writing, it's just been, you know, incredible in terms of what it's taught me and what I've seen of this country. And because I've decided not to write about Hollywood or write about New York City or Washington, D.C., through my work, I've now not only visited all 50s. States, but I've driven them. And I've really, you know, just gotten a sense of what's happening in this country, at least my own sense of it. I'm not saying it's 100% accurate, but it's, I think for writers, it's good to get out of the house. You once said, if a lot has already been written about a subject, I instinctively want to avoid it entirely. Did you feel fast food was

somewhat unexamined, at least by mainstream magazines? Yeah, I did. And, you know, so much of this is just motivated by curiosity. You know, I want to know. And if it's important, then I want to tell other people what I've found. But if I start digging and there's a great book on it or there's a great article on it, it's like, yay, I've just learned what I want to know. And bravo to you for doing all the work. So I don't have to do it.

You know, I mean, I just, and again, you know, if you look at like the bibliographies of the books that I've written, I just love to give shoutouts to other people who have written on this subject because I'm so grateful for it. I would love to think that I'm just this incredibly brilliant, insightful guy, but the reality is I just see my work as part of a process of information getting out there. So, you know, the bibliography, and the footnotes I do, I hate doing. But they're a way of giving a shout out to the works that influence me and that I enjoyed. There are a way of being transparent.

So if you want to doubt what I've said, go look it up. But I also, you know, I want my work to be part of that process. Because if I'm successful, there'll be other people writing about the same subject. You know, I mean, we haven't gotten this, but I had a lot of trouble getting a book contract. to do Fast Food Nation. The major New York publishers turned it down. I mean, I got rejected and rejected. I had won journalism awards, and this article had been very influential.

But again and again, the mainstream publishers said, nobody wants to read about food unless the book has recipes in it. And, you know, Houghton Mifflin was a Boston-based independent publishing house where Aymn Dolan, the editor, I'm not even sure if he knows that I didn't really give other offers. Amen Dolan, you know, Amon took a real risk. He gave me enough money to work on the book for a couple of years, a few years. And when it was published, I just felt, you know, I've done the best that I could. I had no idea if it was going to be a bestseller. They certainly didn't print enough books because once it became successful, they ran out of books, which is not a good thing when you're trying to sell books. You know, now there's a literature, a food literature that's evolved over the last 20 years with incredible books about food.

And, you know, I consider my work just part of that process. And I think the success of Fast Food Nation made it easier for other people who cared passionately about these issues to get their own book contracts. I was hugely ignorant because in so many ways on these subjects I'm self-educated, that there were huge gaps in my knowledge. I didn't realize until after Fast Food Nation was published, that there were writers like Wendell Berry and Francis Moore Lapeie, who had written incredibly good books about food in the 70s and in the 80s that I wasn't aware of.

So, you know, I'm suspicious of writers who make claims that their book is the definitive book. And, you know, even in politics, you know, Karl Marx was a smart guy, but the level of ego and megalomania that leads to other people being Marxists explains a lot of the problems in the world. Anyway, I'm kind of off on a tangent. It's very funny to hear you say that a publisher saying nobody wants to read about food here from 20 years, hence where every other book I see seems to be about food. Well, you know, it's just, you know, I feel like the success of my book helped other writers. And, you know, if my book had never been written, maybe a few years later, Michael Pollan's book would have come out and had exactly the same, you know, impact. Michael Pollan, Raj Patel, Marion Nessel, just written amazing books about food.

And, you know, I'd like to think that I helped just by pushing open the door a little bit. I'm really worried about other writers who will want to challenge the way that things are in the world right now. You know, the publishing world was very different when Fast Food Nation, came out in 2001. Again, it was one of the last independent publishing houses that was willing to publish it. I was an unknown writer in terms of books, and for a writer wanting to do the same thing today,

it would be very hard to get a magazine to support you for four months, let alone eight months, nine months, and provide the kind of template that then turned into a book. So there's never been a greater need for this kind of investigative reporting that challenges the status quo than today. But, you know, it's hard. It was always hard to do. But I think now it's even harder for young writers starting out. And look, I wasn't even that young.

I'm trying to think of how old I was. I was probably getting close to 40. I'd say 41 or 40 when the book is actually published. Yeah. So late 30s when you're writing the magazine story? I was 41 when the book was published, yeah. So I was probably late 30s when it was in magazines. But again, I didn't get published as a writer until my early 30s.

I worked for a film company and I was earning money as a writer, but I wasn't published. So you've sat in the New York Public Library. You've ingested everything you can ingest. You get out on the road and start doing these interviews. I want to ask you about a few of them. One is your meeting with Carl Carcher, the founder of Carl's Jr., was still running or helping run the company at the time. What do you remember about that meeting?

He's just such a lovely guy. And I liked him so much. And yet there was something very poignant about him because he pretty much lost control of his company by then. And, you know, on the one hand, he represented a kind of American entrepreneur that I genuinely admired. On the other hand, his success had kind of destroyed the world that he grew up in.

I mean, my grandfather lived in Southern California in the 1920s, and my grandfather was pretty much the same generation as Carl Cartcher. And maybe some of the things about Carl Carcher reminded me a little bit of my grandfather. My grandfather is very different. but Southern California in the 1920s was a paradise. I mean, Wilshire Boulevard was a dirt road for parts of it, and there were orange groves everywhere. And, you know, the impulse to create a little hamburger stand

to appeal to people in their cars is a great entrepreneurial instinct, and the people who were doing that didn't necessarily anticipate there would someday be 30,000 or 15,000 identical versions of that restaurant were that the car culture that they were appealing to would then, you know, eliminate all the orange groves in Orange County and just, you know, pave over paradise and create these identical homogenous environments so that when you're in the strip mall land of Southern California, it looks a lot like the strip mall land of Colorado or Ohio, et cetera, et cetera. And so in writing about Carl Carcher,

I wanted him to seem like a sympathetic figure because I really liked him. And rather than demonize these people, give a sense of how so many of the impacts of the fast food industry were unintended. Now, you know, if I've written about Roy Kroc, the founder of McDonald's, it might not have been as sympathetic portrait because he seemed like a real asshole. And one of the great things about him was he was just brutal. You know, he was

something like, I think there was a quote that if he saw one of his competitors drowning, he'd walk over and put a hose in his mouth. I thought also really interesting that here's the great marketer to children who comes up with a kind of the ominous clown, you know, Ronald McDonald, who never has children himself. And the great ending to the Ray Kroc story for me is Joan Kroc, his widow, who I think was a cocktail waitress when he met her. And she married him and put up with him. And then he died.

And then he just gave away all, she gave away all of his money to really liberal causes. I think she gave the biggest contribution to NPR ever and Planned Parenthood. So, you know, there was a, there was a good twist to the ending of that story. But anyways, I really enjoyed meeting Carl Carcher, and I really liked him, and I tried not to demonize him. So he's the rich guy who runs the chain. How do you meet people who actually work behind the counter in fast food restaurants? Oh, my God. That's just the easiest thing to do.

I mean, you know, I set the thing in Colorado, and I just got in touch with all these Colorado high schools and said I'd love to talk to any students who work at fast food restaurants. And I went to a bunch of high schools. I met a bunch of fast food workers. Once you meet one fast food worker, you meet another fast food worker, et cetera. I mean, when I wrote the, when I wrote the piece on the marijuana industry and I wanted to talk to marijuana growers, you know, at the time, you could get life without parole under federal law for not even that big of marijuana operation. That was tough. You know, meeting marijuana,

finding marijuana growers willing to talk to me was tough. And, you know, the one I wrote about, just off the record, I mean, he basically said that if I ratted him out, he'd kill me. And so, in general, I will not reveal my sources and I will go to prison before revealing my sources. But if one of your sources says he's going to kill you, if you reveal who he is, that's an even greater incentive. So it's a long way of saying meeting fast food workers, meeting migrant farm workers who are undocumented, meeting meatpacking workers who are undocumented, it's really not hard to do. You just have to go to where they are and spend the time, you know, meeting people at their own level. It's interesting to me because these are workers who you write, the fast food industry

has conspired to make powerless, nearly so. They were not worried about talking to you a journalist. Well, you know, if there was ever any possibility, and this is true for the drug dealers on that too, there's any possibility of them being harmed by speaking to me, I just, you know, use a pseudonym. But in the fact-checking, in the fact-checking, and everything that I write is fact-checked.

I'm not saying it's all 100% correct because I'm a flawed human being, but I hate to be wrong. And when you're writing about powerful groups that want to destroy you, any mistake you make plays into their hands. So everything I write is fact checks. So the fact checkers would talk to these people to make sure that I got things right. But I would change the names so there wouldn't be any, you know,

any repercussions for people who talk to me. And, you know, if you, I'm not saying I'm a saint or a great guy and people who know me, if you were to interview them, would probably give you a long litany of, you know, horrible characteristics. But, you know, with my writing, I'm really sincerely trying to get it what's going on. And I'm really sincerely trying not treat people like objects, the people I write about. I'm trying to treat like they're human beings. I'm trying. And so, So, you know, whether it's nuclear weapons or meatpacking or migrant farm workers, I feel like if people trust where you're coming from, then they're going to be willing to talk

openly to you. And if you're really willing to protect them. So, you know, from my nuclear weapons book, which is my last book, I mean, I can't believe some of the things that I learned. And I never put in the book so much of what I learned because I don't want anyone to know it. And it's just, I don't know, and again, you know, I think it was Janet Malcolm wrote a book about an essay or something about journalists basically exploiting and using their sources and that's inherent in the relationship. and I don't think that's true. I think that, you know, you have relationships in your life and, you know, you try to treat people with respect and try not to use them. But in my case, you know, because of the nature, particularly of the media, 10 or 15 years ago, you know, I was just consciously trying to push voices in the media that you weren't hearing and that, weren't being represented.

And, you know, look, I'm a bald, white, late middle-aged, privileged, cisgender, heterosexual male, but those weren't the voices that I was trying to get into the mainstream. And for the people who were pissed off at me after I wrote about them, you know, it's happened. but it generally tends to be powerful corporate executives or government officials who are pissed off. And anyway, it's a memorable scene in both the magazine stories and then Fast Food Nation, the book, where you visit a slaughterhouse in the high plains. How did you get inside the slaughterhouse? Well, you know, it's the 20th anniversary, and I've never really talked about it at length,

but I went in as a worker. I went in as a non-Neglish-speaking Latino worker. And the great irony is I don't speak any Spanish. But neither did the supervisor, the white male supervisor, that night. And so I was just brought in as a new worker. And, you know, for the most part, I don't lie. when I'm doing my reporting. I mean, even with the corporate officials, executives,

I'm very blunt. This is what I'm doing. This is why I'm doing it. You want to talk to me great. You don't want to talk to me. I'm still going to write it. I argue with them when I'm interviewing them. I don't lead them to believe that I'm their friend

when I'm actually going to be critical of them because it's just interesting to have a blunt conversation. But that was an instance in which I engaged in deception. And I engaged in deception because none of the meatpacking companies would let me into a slaughterhouse. I was writing about slaughterhouse workers. I was writing about what goes in these plants. And I felt I need to see for myself. So I went in there. And, you know, I hadn't talked about which one it was. But it was the slaughterhouse in Greeley, which, you know, I wrote about it's maybe implied in the book. But I never mentioned which one was. It was the slaughterhouse in Greeley. And that fucking slaughterhouse turned out to be the epicenter of a COVID outbreak in Colorado.

And, I mean, it's just, it's appalling to me that 20 years later that the conditions are worse. You know, up in Sinclair wrote The Jungle. The Jungle is a far better, far more important, far more influential book than Fast Food Nation. In many ways, Fast Food Nation pays homage to the jungle. The whole meatpacking section, the whole book is to lead you into the meat. The whole structure of Fast Food Nation is leading you into the meatpacking section because I borrowed from Upton Sinclair the metaphor of meatpacking being a metaphor for the rooflessness of American capitalism.

And Upton Sinclair, after the publication of the jungle, you know, said I aimed for the public's heart and accidentally hit the stomach. And same thing happened with Fast food. the nation. I mean, you know, things are so much worse in meatpacking today. There's so much worse in so many areas. And, you know, so many readers who read Fast Phoenician came away thinking, well, what is this food doing to me? You know, what happens if I eat it? And not what is this system doing to the poorest, most vulnerable workers in the United States. And when I talk about capitalism, I'm not a Marxist and I'm not embracing in any way upton-Suclair's form of socialism.

And at the end of the jungle, there's a chapter that's just this celebration of the kind of socialism that's going to come and help all the workers. And it's remarkably similar to what later came to the Soviet Union and screwed over workers is even 100 times worse. But, you know, fast food nation isn't really about fast food. it really isn't about food. It's about what happens when you have unchecked corporate power. When you have oligopolis and monopolies, what does that do to workers? What does that do to the environment? What does that do to consumers?

And, you know, 20 years later, there's even more monopoly power. I mean, just in every single sector of our economy. And the meatpacking companies are even more powerful. I think when we were talking, you know, before the interview started, there's a line I'd have to find it in the book. I haven't looked in the book in so long, but the gist of, it was in the conclusion of Fast Food Nation. There was a sentence like, the great struggle of the 20th century was against totalitarian. Do you have the quote? I do. I have it right here.

Could you read it to me? Because I don't, I remember the gist of it, but what would it say? Here's the quote. The history of the 20th century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems. of state power. The 21st will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power. Right. That was 20 years ago. So I got half of it right. The 21st century is going to be marked by a struggle against unchecked corporate power. What I didn't realize is, oh, my God, totalitarian state power is back. You know, I mean, I thought with a fall of the Berlin Wall

and the Soviet Union and democracy all over the world, but, oh my God, I could not. never have dreamed of Donald Frump or whatever's name really was, Trump and Hungary and all over the world. I mean, China right now. So now we've got a double-bauer challenge. We've got totalitarian state power. We've got unchecked monopoly power. I mean, you know, the concentration in one industry after another is just it harkens back to the late 19th century. So I mentioned this in Fast Food Nation, the great irony is that, you know, in the name of freedom and a free market, one market after another is just getting taken over by two or three different corporations that cooperate and collude with one another. And one of the slightly encouraging things is

the Republican Party, up until the last few years, has just aided and abetted monopoly power again and again. But because the tech companies seem to be politically liberal, you have some antitrust support finally in the Republican Party because, you know, the Republican Party was the party of antitrust in the early 20th century. Anyway, so, you know, for those of you who don't want to read Fast Food Nation, I just want the clip notes version, it's not really about food. It's about corporate monopoly power. And, you know, I'm very grateful for the success of the book. I'm very grateful that it had an impact and helped other writers get their books published. But in terms of what it concretely achieved in the world, I don't know.

You know, everything's worse. And I guess you shouldn't expect that a book is going to really change the world. But you'd like to think that things wouldn't get worse. Back to the slaughterhouse for just one second. You've come in as a worker. Did you actually do a night's work in the slaughterhouse? I'm a new worker. And so the person who brought me in, and look, I mean, it's shameful that I don't speak Spanish. I've spent years, I've spent over 20 years now fighting for migrant worker rights. Almost all the migrant workers are Spanish speaking. I always have somebody translating for me. It's just, it's shameful. And that night, I was with a Spanish-speaking worker. who wanted me to see what was going on in the plant and introduced me as a new worker.

And as a new worker wanted to give me a tour of the entire plant. So we spent hours just seeing that place top to bottom. And so that's what I did. Are you scribbling notes while this tour is going on or is that all later? it's later. So you come back and just try to write down. It's a two step later. One is, right after we leave, I just write, right, right, right, right, right.

And then I go out to dinner with the person who brought me in there and we go eat some red meat. And it was tough. Oh, I can imagine. It was really, really tough. I mean, you know, in recreating it, it was easy to do because, you know, he's a work, he's in that plant all the time. And we just went through everything that I had just seen. And, you know, from a literary point of view, the thing that made it work for me in trying to write it was I recreated how I experienced. it, which is counterintuitive.

Because the obvious way to write it would have been the cows come in one end, the cattle comes in one end, and at the end here you've got the meat. But because my experience of going through the plant was the opposite, that's how I wrote it. So you wind up with a cattle about to, you know, have their last breaths. It's very powerful that way. You end with the cattle who do not know what is going to happen to them sort of ambling toward the door of the slaughterhouse. None the wiser. And then the guy with a knockout gun is standing there waiting.

I want to ask you a few things, Eric, about your writing itself. I read your sentences and they feel all, they've all been stripped down to their essence. Every showy part of it, every extraneous part of it has been taken off. Most memorably in there is shit in the meat, perhaps in this book. Is that a conscious decision on your part to write as compactly as possible? Well, God, thank you for even bothering to notice. If you were to read stuff that I wrote when I was younger, like in my 20s, the sentences were very showy and they were clever.

I'm not saying they were good. I'm not saying they were funny, but there was an enormous amount of, self-consciousness in it. And as I got older, I just decided I wanted to fight to get at the truth of things. And to get at the truth of things, I had to strip away as much as I possibly could and not call attention to myself, but desperately try to convey the reality. So, yeah, I mean, it's so much harder to write simply. It is so hard to write simply.

And that's what I try to do. And I just, anyway, that's what I try to do. I just want to say something about eating a steak after going to the slaughterhouse. Sure. You know, if there's one thing I took away from FastFord Nation and that stayed with me profoundly in the year since, it was published was the institutionalized cruelty and immorality of factory farms. So I don't want to be flipping about it. I mean, I'm not a vegan or a vegetarian that I eat very, very little meat.

And the meat that I eat does not come from the industrial system. And if someone were to come from another planet and look at the factory farms that we have, right now in the United States, they would think of human beings as the most brutal and sadistic animals imaginable, because these are sentient creatures. And the thing that is the worst, and it's just gotten worse since Pashtood Nation came out, are our hog farms because hogs are highly intelligent, sensitive creatures. And it's just, it's just disgraceful. you know again back to why I do this so much of this occurs because it's out of sight and it's

out of mind and um you know if most people saw how livestock was being treated and how livestock was being raised um I really believe most people would change their eating habits anyway so you know anyway that's just one thought I wanted to make sure was clear no absolutely That thing I would say about your writing, I saw one review describe it as heaving with facts. They meant that in a very complimentary way. I hope it's not heaving as in, you know, vomiting, that sort of heaving. I wanted to know, though. How do you find the line between the right number of facts and too many facts?

I don't know. I mean, I just, I can never know enough. I can never learn enough about a subject. And then at some point I just have to stop. And so I accept, from the time I write the first word on the first page, I just accept, this is going to be flawed. The book is already flawed. It's imperfect.

And I just accept that there's going to be a level of imperfection to it. I hope it's not huge, but it's just, it's built in. And ultimately, my hope is that you, the reader, will read from the upper left-hand corner of the first page to the lower right-hand corner of the last page. And as a writer, I want to provide an interesting and rewarding and complex life experience reading something. something I've written. I want it to be I don't know that enjoyable because I write about such dark subjects but I want it to be rewarding. I'm trying very hard not to write adjut prop. I'm trying very hard not to write things that are simplistic, that are trying hard to write things that are open to different interpretations because

I think good writing is complex and these subjects are complex. But I guess you know the real measure of are there too many facts as is it too hard to read and do people stop reading? And I definitely, you know, I have one friend who shall remain nameless. And for everything I write, I just say, so what page did you stop reading? And he very bluntly tells me, you know, what page it is. And, you know, I, I, the nuclear weapon book, some people loved it. Some people just told me the page they stopped reading and I don't know. You know, you do the best you can. First installment of Fast Food Nation appears in the September 3rd, 1998 issue of Rolling Stone,

which has Shania Twain on the cover and then a line about your story. Yeah. And an ancient art of what they used to call the mix in magazines. Yeah. We're going to give them some celebrity and then we're going to give them some ass-kicking investigative journalism and we can do that under one roof. Yeah. God love Rolling Stone because I'd so much rather her picture be on the cover than mine.

And certainly far more magazines were sold and there was far more opportunity for people to read it. You know, to be able to write what I want to write and to get it published pretty much how you wrote it is a privilege. So, you know, what was the other one? There were two. It was one. Yeah, Alanis Morissette was the second cover. Great.

Right? Somebody's going to buy that and they're going to open to page 45 and go. Yeah. And I like them both, you know, so. You mentioned Eamon Dolan at Hout Mifflin buying the book. Yeah.

Your only offer to buy the book. Yeah. I hope he's not watching this. I think that my agent might have led him to believe there was more than one. There wasn't. What's the biggest thing they need to happen to get from magazine? story to book in this case? You mean aside from being paid to be able to spend the time to do it? There's that. Yeah, but what did you need to add? Well, you know, the only reason to do it as a book

is if you feel there's just so much more to say that you didn't have a chance to say. And, you know, after writing the article, I just, there was so much more to say. It felt like this could be a book. One thing, I did talk to A. Edelon this week. And one thing, he told me it was really interesting about organizing the book. Because you don't, you don't have one story here. You have lots and lots and lots of different kinds of stories in this book, different people, different stories. And he said it was almost organized like light to dark. So we start with a portrait of Carl Cartreuth. As you say, somebody you had admiration for, at least a lot of admiration for. And then we work backward in the book, it's darker and darker.

And eventually we find ourselves, you know, talking about labor conditions and the slaughterhouse and where the meat comes from. Is that a conscious decision on? your part? Totally a conscious decision. And if I remember, I think the article was structured the same way. And, you know, the whole structure of the book is leading you into the slaughterhouse. And again, that's just, that's up in Sinclair. That's not me. I mean, but it's a, it's a literary decision, but it's also, I don't know, there's a, the history of the industry. The industry started it out in the optimistic Eisenhower era with, you know, these entrepreneurs creating a whole new business.

They didn't anticipate the dark side of the American meal. They, you know, they were just trying to make money and sell hamburgers and French fries inexpensively. One of the real challenges of Fast Food Nation in terms of writing it is it's not structured as my journey into the world of fast food. I mean, Hunter Thompson and Hell's Angels, and Hunter Thompson is a writer. I love his work.

There's certain writers who are writing about themselves, but they're not really writing about themselves. They're using themselves as a vehicle to look at these bigger issues. And I love that writing, but that's just not me. That's just not what I do. So I was never going to write about my journey,

my three-year journey into the world of fast food. So the structure is a really complicated structure and it's really difficult. And even now, I wonder about parts of it. It's the working out of an idea. You know, it's sort of set in Colorado, but it takes you all over the place, but it's the unfolding of an argument

about this industry and about America. And as you mentioned, it goes from light to dark. The next big book I did, Command of Control, is the story of a nuclear weapons accident. and then I go off on tangents. So that is a classic narrative that I go off on tangents. The book that I've been working on for many years about prisons has a structure similar to Fast Food Nation,

which is the working out of an argument about America. But there's no central character. There's no single prison. There's no single story. And that's a lot harder to do, and maybe it'll suck, you know, but I'm trying. You told the writer Robert Boynton something about editing you. You said, I care about every semicolon, every word, every comma.

Yeah. And why do you care about every semicolon, every word, every comma? I feel like ultimately writing is a craft, and it's a craft like carpentry or, you know, anything that requires a sort of an ethic in it. And, you know, we started out this conversation talking about celebrity and stuff like that. I mean, I think this conversation right now is one of the two or three conversations I've ever really had about myself and my work or why I do it, et cetera. I mean, certainly the biographical detail, because that's not what's motivating me. I mean, what's motivating me is my love of writing and my engagement with the world and the writing. who I really admired were engaged in the world.

And so if you care about your craft, you care about every word, you care about every punctuation mark, even if no one else notices and no one else cares, because ultimately you can't control if it's gonna be successful. You can't control if it's gonna be unsuccessful. There were writers who wrote beautiful books, amazing books,

that were published after September 11th of 2001, 2001, and for the next three to four months, nobody gave a shit about any of it. And there's timing, there's all kinds of stuff. So all you control is the work that you do. And whether that's the research, whether that's the fact-checking, whether that's the bibliography, but also the actual words on the page, and that's what you do. And that's what I do. Do you have a technique for getting your way with an editor about the way a particular line's going to read without seeming like a total asshole because I feel that's a real art with writers. I want to be, I want to be demanding.

I want this to sound exactly a certain way, but there's a certain point at which they're just going to be like, you're a lot of effort and I don't want to deal with this anymore. I haven't gotten, but I don't want to deal with it anymore. I've definitely gotten that you're a lot of effort because I'm really engaged with it. But having said that, I love it. when editors have great ideas because it makes it better. And to have another brain, a really good brain, adds to it enormously. I mean, Aiman, I can't remember which ones, but Aymn helped shift the order of chapters.

A few chapters made it much better. Corby Cumber. I spent almost a year on a piece on homicide in America, looking at from the point of view of the family members of murder victims and why murder isn't really that funny and why it isn't like it is on TV. And Corby came up with a title for it. It's just such a beautiful title.

I mean, the title was, I'm trying to remember what my title was. My title was just very blunt and generic, like murder in America. I don't know. It wasn't very good. I thought it was good. And then Corby's title was a grief like no other, which is the grief that follows homicide.

And it's not only descriptive and true, but there's something poetic about it. And, you know, Will Fast Food Nation, oh my God, that's a great title. I mean, if life were fair, it would be, the book would say, Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, parenthesis, title by Will Dana.

So, you know, when you get a good editor, you know, the writer gets all the credit, but the editors thinking and ideas and suggestions are in it. But, you know, there are also editors that can make things shitty. And if you care about every word, you've got to protect what you've done, but you've got to be open to the possibility it can be done better. And I love, I love people who make things better. You mentioned timing and good timing. I was interested to discover that this book was published the week that George W. Bush was sworn in as president in 2001. So we're coming out of eight years of the Clinton administration when a lot of people hope that there would be a fundamental change in the relationship between government and business that would change the relationship that had been established in the Reagan years, which you write about in this book.

It doesn't happen to a large degree. George W. Bush is elected. Does that, do you think, have an effect on the success of the book, just the moment? moment it comes yeah i think it really i think it really did because the book you know beyond being about McDonald's or fast food is a critique of the way things are and um you know bush was not elected president bush took power and uh the Supreme court decision what was it Bush versus Gore or whatever was that was a disgrace Supreme Court decision to stop the counting of votes in Florida. It contradicted all those

conservative justices judicial philosophy for their whole lives of, you know, the courts shouldn't be, judges shouldn't be activists. They actively stopped the count of a vote to decide an American election anyway. So I think there was a wake-up call and people were wondering what is going on. And I guess my book was countercultural. And then I can't remember the chronology, but then Mount Cow disease happened around that time. So people started thinking about food. And you can't control any of that. Again, all you can do is the best job you can with words on the page.

there are and since I became you know vaguely successful as a writer I've met other successful writers and some really successful writers I know are just terrible people and they're plagiarists and they're lousy writers and they're hugely successful and I have friends who are writers who are amazingly gifted beautiful writers you know who just never had that success so there's a there's an injustice and there's a fickleness to it unless the success is yours then it's totally deserved no i mean you know so you just appreciate it when you get it and you look at the careers of writers and you know they go up and they go down and some of them who were so famous disappear and are forgotten and some of them who were obscure are rediscovered and are read forever and again all you can do is

is do the best you can for the words on the page. Because the book is so powerful, I think it would be easy for you to get cast as a lifelong food activist, someone who gets called to testify when new laws are proposed or is a talking head in every documentary about the subject. How did you feel about that?

You know, I feel really, I feel really grateful. I never set out to do that, but I'm really fortunate in that these big things that I write, you know, I really care about them. I care about these issues and I don't stop caring about them, you know, once I'm done writing about them. So that work on farm, that piece on migrant farm workers came out maybe 1995, so that's like 26 years ago.

I'm still really active on farm worker issues. I mean, I don't think any change is going to happen because I give somebody a quote or I testify, but if someone wants my help, I'm there. And I continue to care about food issues in the same way. You know, and the nuclear weapon book I wrote came out in 2013. So that's eight years ago. I'm really engaged in nuclear weapons issues. You know, before any group, when a group contacts me, you know, and they want me to help them,

I say, you know, are you sure you want my help? because 98% of the time, the causes I get involved in end in total defeat. I mean, just complete and total defeat. And I'm not, again, so egotomaniacles to think that I'm totally responsible for the defeat, but I've just been involved in so many losing causes. But there's one group that I've helped for 20 years almost, the Coalition of Amokwe Workers, which is a farm worker group in Florida, about that has been remarkably successful.

And I'm not saying because of me, but I've tried to help them, and it's been incredibly gratifying to see this farm worker group succeed. And I think, you know, in general, for these sorts of issues, you lose, you lose, you lose, you lose, you lose, you lose, you lose, you lose, and then maybe you win.

And it feels all the better when you win after you've lost, you know, again and again. But I think that's how change happens. You have to have an almost existential view that it's worth doing because it's worth doing and it's important. And maybe at some point, whether you're around or not, you'll win. I mean, the first real slavery abolitionists in the United States were the late 18th century, early 19th century. And they didn't live to see the end of slavery. and in terms of the real impact of slavery,

we're still suffering from it. So you just try to be part of the process. When it comes to fast food and corporate power in that context, do you think we're still in the losing stage right now? Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, you know, since the publication of Fast Food Nation, you know, there's been a sea change in the eating habits of well-educated, upper-middle class and wealthy people.

And I think that's great, you know, Whole Foods and Trader Joe's and organics and farmers' markets. I support all those things. But that's not how most Americans are eating. And the fast food companies have really emulated the tobacco companies as well-educated and wealthy people stop smoking. The tobacco companies focused on the poor and people of color. and overseas markets for cigarettes. It's exactly what the fast food industry has done, focusing on communities of color,

on poor people, and on overseas markets. And one of the striking things is Africa. The fast food companies are now pushing into, for example, into Ghana. And you're now seeing in Ghana huge rise in obesity. All of the problems that come, from this fast food diet. And, you know, in Fast Food Nation, I basically use the phrase fast food diet. Now, I think in nutrition science, you know, it's more specific ultra-processed foods,

which is what fast foods are. I mean, in the book, I give the list of ingredients in a fast-food milkshake, and it's like, you know, this bizarre list of chemical names. I mean, that's, that is the quintessential ultra-processed food. And two-thirds of the calories that American children get it from ultra-processed foods. I mean, that's just a recipe for poor health. And so in so many ways, things are worse, but there is more awareness. And, you know, I remain hopeful. Optimists think that everything's going to work out okay. I wouldn't say I'm optimistic, but I'm hopeful. I think that there's still a chance. You mentioned your book about prisons. Can we close with you describing what is in the Zoom,

shot there behind you, the library you have assembled on the subject of prisons? How many books are we talking about? This is just a partial mass incarceration. I won't show you the rest of my office because people will really think I'm a madman. But, you know, I've been going into prison since 1994. And I wrote a piece for the Atlantic in 98 called the Prison Industrial Complex, which is a way to understand why we're. we were prisoning so many people.

And the article was widely read, and I think it helped introduce that phrase into the mainstream. And I gave a speech before all the heads of departments of corrections in the United States in 1999. And there were about 1.5 million people behind prison. And the article had so much of an impact that it went up to 2.2 million. And now I think we're down to 2 million because of COVID. But again, you know, I'm writing a book about prisons. But it's not really about prisons.

It's about this country and how this country has chosen to deal with the weak and the poor and the severely mentally ill and people of color. And what does that tell you about this country? So, you know, I've been working on it for many years and I really want to finish it. And when I finish it, I hope people read it, but I will. But I will have tried. For me, mass incarceration is one of the most important historical events of my lifetime. And I feel like I'm going to try to give my view of why it happened, how it happened, and what it's done to this country and what it says about this country.

And oddly enough, in the same years that this country was. building factory farms in a way in rural America that embodied a kind of institutionalized cruelty, we were building prisons in the same rural community. I mean, it's just, and the mindset is connected. And I'll just end on this one thing. There's one street in America that just brings together all of my interests, and it's Amarillo Boulevard, in Amarillo, Texas, and on Emerilla Boulevard, you will find one of the nation's biggest slaughterhouses,

a maximum security prison, and our primary nuclear weapons factory. And they're all on the same street. And when you drive Amarillo Boulevard at night and you squint your eyes and they're all lit up, you might mistake the slaughterhouse for the prison for the nuclear weapons factory. So there you have it. Eric Schloser's literary interests all on one street. I'm going to call the mayor's office in Amarillo and see if we can get the street renamed. It might be interesting.

Yeah. Okay. It's so much fun to talk to you, Eric. Thank you so much for coming on the press box. Thank you. Hey, thanks for taking an interest. All right. One PS to our story.

Will Dana, who is the Rolling Stone editor who assigned that story to Eric Schlazer, told me that after Eric's stories came out, McDonald's actually canceled its advertising in the magazine for several years. The guys at Rolling Stone who handled the account were upset, Dana told me. But in general, there was this feeling of, so what? Ah, the days when magazines were rich enough not to worry about losing major ads. I am Brian Curtis. The producer of this podcast is Erica Cervantes.

Thanks to Will Dana and Eamondolen for all their time and assistance. And thanks to the fabulous used bookstore Bookman in Orange, California, for selling me a first edition of Fast Food Nation. Two things before we go, I'd love to come up with a name for our book revisit podcasts, which I'm calling The Great Books for now. If you've got an idea, send it to at the press box pod. Also, if you like this podcast, please share it.

Your help in spreading the word will be gratefully received. My partner, David Shoemaker, and I are back Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then.