Still a Fast Food Nation
Episode 35 of Unconfined, in which journalist Eric Shlosser reflects on the 25th anniversary of his landmark book, Fast Food Nation.
Fast Food Nation, 25 Years Later
By Tom Philpott Subscribe to Host Notes
A quarter of a century ago, I worked as an editor/reporter at an obscure financial-services trade magazine in New York City. Though my day job involved what is surely the least remunerative occupation related to finance, my brain was already fixated on food. I cooked it in my tiny kitchen, I grew it in a small plot in a Brooklyn community garden, and devoted my scant disposable income to the city ‘s legendary Greenmarkets, as well as to its budding base of small farm-to-table restaurants. As I basked in the deliciousness around me, I started mulling hard questions: why did one have to spend so much, in time and money, to get hold of even passable food in the richest country on Earth? Why, in my entire lifetime, had U.S. food culture been dominated by corporations fronted by clowns, dolls, and pretend kings—and that churned out such dull and junky stuff? Even to a casual observer, it already seemed obvious that a national food culture centered on processed fare was triggering the spread of diet-related maladies like type II diabetes.
At that point, I don’t think it had even occurred to me to apply my trade, journalism, to digging into the topics that were grabbing my attention. And then everything changed. I had not been aware of journalist Eric Schlosser’s foundational food-system reportage in The Atlantic (1995) and Rolling Stone (1998). In 2001, he brought it all together and fleshed it out—pun intended—in the blockbuster book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. With incendiary detail, Schlosser reported from central California’s vast strawberry fields, a French fry factory in Idaho, a beef-packing plant in the High Plains, and fast-food franchises in suburban Colorado, tuning into the voices and stories of the workers who propped up our food.
Reading Fast Food Nation in 2001 was an extraordinary experience. It inspired me to think of the contemporary food scene as a system begging for serious journalistic attention—that is to say, what we call in the trade a beat. (At that point, I had been thinking seriously of leaving journalism at least temporarily for culinary school.) It also taught me that working the food-system beat would require a steady focus on labor. Schlosser showed with lacerating precision that a handful of extremely powerful and profitable corporations dominated the whole edifice—and that their business models hinged on millions of low-paid, often ruthlessly exploited workers. Schlosser drove home the grim truth that the workers who feed the nation—in farm fields, meatpacking plants, eateries, supermarkets—often don’t make enough income to feed their families without food aid. Nor, he showed, can they count on enforcement of the occupational-safety standards established by federal legislation in the 1970s. I am far from the only journalist whose life course Fast Food Nation altered.
This month, the publisher Mariner Classics is out with a 25th anniversary edition, complete with a blistering new afterword. To celebrate this momentous occasion, we invited Schlosser onto Unconfined to talk about his classic book and what has changed since it first came out.
Happily for the life of his book, but unhappily for the planet, almost everything in Fast Food Nation remains all-too relevant today. Take the chapter, “The Most Dangerous Job,” in which Schlosser delivers the most vivid eyewitness account of what goes on inside a massive slaughterhouse that I’m aware of since Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1903). Very few scribes since Sinclair’s time have been allowed to walk into a facility and describe what goes on inside. And of course, in the near-century between Sinclair’s forays onto Chicago’s kill floors and Schlosser’s into an unnamed facility on the Plains, the industry had scaled up dramatically. Twenty-five years after publication, Fast Food Nation’s precise descriptions of the blood and guts some workers endure to deliver our meat supply are tough to read—and I think the industry finds our propensity to want to look away quite convenient. In addition to the gore, he shows, workers wield sharp tools rapidly and make repetitive motions for hours on end, both of which make them vulnerable to injury. “Again and again, workers told me that they are under tremendous pressure not to report injuries,” Schlosser writes—a condition that remains in place today, as described in previous Unconfined episodes with guests such as the labor leader Magaily Licolli and the former Obama administration labor regulator Debbie Berkowitz.
The book also teases out another issue still much in the news today: the ever-accelerating speeds at which the industry runs its disassembly lines. Faster line speeds mean higher profits—and also more injuries for workers and more opportunity for microbial pathogens to enter our food supply. And Schlosser dissects the fast-food industry’s massive investment in, and clever strategies for, marketing its unhealthy offerings, particularly to children.
In our conversation, Schlosser and I discuss what has and hasn’t changed on the beat since the book’s debut at the dawn of the 21st century. And why his recent Atlantic reporting (see here and here) on “Alligator Alcatraz”—a short-lived ICE detention facility in the Florida Everglades, hotly publicized by the Trump Administration—is all-too relevant to the discussion of how our nation treats its food system workers in 2026. Tune in!