ERIC SCHLOSSER

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal

Monday, April 7 at 7:30pm · Mountainlair Ballroom

Award-winning journalist Eric Schlosser has been investigating the fast food industry for years. In 1998, his two-part article on the subject in Rolling Stone generated more mail than any other story the magazine had run in years. The subsequent book, Fast Food Nation, has been on The New York Times bestseller list for more than a year (hardcover and paperback combined) and has appeared on the bestseller lists of the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, The Washington Post, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly, among others.

Schlosser has interviewed slaughterhouse workers; cattle ranchers; potato farmers; fast food employees, founders, and franchisees; and families who have lost a loved one to food poisoning. From his extensive research and travels for the book, he has unearthed a wealth of little-known, often unsettling truths about the fast food industry.

In the book, Schlosser likens the story of fast food to the story of postwar America. Fast food, says Schlosser, has triggered the homogenization of our society by hastening the malling of our landscape, widening the chasm between rich and poor, fueling an epidemic of obesity, and propelling the juggernaut of American cultural imperialism abroad. Schlosser’s myth-shattering survey stretches from the Californian subdivisions where the business was born to the industrial corridor along the New Jersey Turnpike where many of fast food’s flavors are concocted.

The New York Times lauds, “Schlosser is a serious and diligent reporter, and Fast Food Nation isn't an airy deconstruction but an avalanche of facts and observations as he examines the fast food process from meat to marketing ... This is a fine piece of muckraking, alarming without being alarmist.”

In addition to writing for Rolling Stone, Schlosser has contributed to The New Yorker and has been a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly since 1996. He has appeared on 60 Minutes, CNN, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, FOX News, The O’Reilly Factor, and Extra!, and has been interviewed on National Public Radio and for Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, and The New York Times. He won a National Magazine Award for “Reefer Madness” and “Marijuana and the Law” and has received a Sidney Hillman Foundation Award for reporting. His work has been nominated for several other National Magazine awards and for the Loeb Award for business journalism.