Eric Schlosser Quotes

Pull open the glass door, feel the rush of cool air, walk inside, get in line, and look around you, look at the kids working in the kitchen, at the customers in their seats, at the ads for the latest toys, study the backlit color photographs above the counter, think about where the food came from, about how and where it was made, about what is set in motion by every single fast food purchase, the ripple effect near and far, think about it. Then place your order. Or turn and walk out the door. It's not too late. Even in this fast food nation, you can still have it your way.

Very few people realize that the U.S. government does not have the power to order the recall of contaminated meat.

A generation ago, three-quarters of the money used to buy food in the United States was spent to prepare meals at home. Today about half of the money used to buy food is spent at restaurants
mainly at fast food restaurants.

The current demand for marijuana and pornography is deeply revealing. Here are two commodities that Americans publicly abhor, privately adore, and buy in astonishing amounts.

The drug use at Homestead was suspected after a fully armed Russian MiG-17 fighter plane, flown by a Cuban defector, landed there unchallenged, while Air Force One was parked on a nearby runway.

Firstly, should we be selling and buying irradiated meat? I think that's up to the consumer, ultimately. But the second point is, this irradiated meat should be clearly and unmistakably labeled as irradiated meat.

I think there could hardly be a more important subject than health and nutrition.

McDonald's has been extraordinary at site selection; it was a pioneer in studying the best places for retail locations. One of the things it did is study very carefully where sprawl was headed.

There is a growing market today for local, organic foods produced by small farmers. And farmers' markets have played a large role in making that happen.

When Agnew and Cotter showed the committee how the new lock worked, it didn't. Something was wrong. But none of the senators, congressmen, or committee staff members realized that it wouldn't unlock, no matter how many times the proper code was entered. The decoder looked impressive, the colored lights flashed, and everyone in the hearing room agreed that it was absolutely essential for national security.

The medical literature on the causes of food poisoning is full of euphemisms and dry scientific terms: coliform levels, aerobic plate counts, sorbitol, MacConkey agar, and so on. Behind them lies a simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill: There is shit in the meat.

Since 1966, hundreds of books have been published that follow murderers along their paths of destruction. Every serial killer, it seems, now has a biographer or two.

One crucial fact must be kept in mind: none of the roughly seventy thousand nuclear weapons built by the United States since 1945 has ever detonated inadvertently or without proper authorization. The technological and administrative controls on those weapons have worked, however imperfectly at times - and countless people, military and civilian, deserve credit for that remarkable achievement. Had a single weapon been stolen or detonated, America's command-and-control system would still have attained a success rate of 99.99857 percent. But nuclear weapons are the most dangerous technology ever invented. Anything less than 100 percent control of them, anything less than perfect safety and security, would be unacceptable. And if this book has any message to preach, it is that human beings are imperfect.

The thing that's been inhibiting long-form investigative reporting is fear - fear of being sued, of being unpopular, of being criticized by very powerful groups.

Congress should ban advertising that preys upon children, it should stop subsidizing dead-end jobs, it should pass tougher food safety laws, it should protect American workers from serious harm, it should fight against dangerous concentrations of economic power.

By 1940, there were about a million cars in Los Angeles, more cars than in forty-one states.

About eighty thousand people were killed in Hiroshima and more than two thirds of the buildings were destroyed because 0.7 gram of uranium-235 was turned into pure energy. A dollar bill weighs more than that.

Unlike the hot line frequently depicted in Hollywood films, the new system didn't provide a special telephone for the president to use in an emergency. It relied on Teletype machines that could send text quickly and securely. Written statements were considered easier to translate, more deliberate, and less subject to misinterpretation than verbal ones. Every

Right now thousands of missiles are hidden away, literally out of sight, topped with warheads and ready to go, awaiting the right electrical signal. They are a collective death wish, barely suppressed. Every one of them is an accident waiting to happen, a potential act of mass murder. They are out there, waiting, soulless and mechanical, sustained by our denial - and they work.

'Fast Food Nation' appeared as an article in 'Rolling Stone' before it was a book, so I was extending it from the article, and by that time, everyone could read the article.

There's been a growing effort to kick soda out of the schools. And governors as different as Arnold Schwarzenegger in California and Mike Huckabee in Arkansas have worked hard to get soda and junk food out of their state schools, which is good.

I'm just angry at the sort of things that are winding up in ground beef. I'm angry that other people - mainly children - are going to be sickened by eating a hamburger.

Whatever replaces the fast food industry should be regional, diverse, authentic, unpredictable, sustainable, profitable
and humble. It should know its limits.

Basically, I'm a perpetual student. I start by finding a subject I really don't know very much, but that I'm curious about. I learn about it through books in a library, by doing interviews with people who know a lot about the subject, and by going out on my own and seeing for myself what's happening.

The people designing the weapons literally often didn't know how they were being handled in the field by the Air Force - and a lot of people in the Air Force didn't understand some of the dangers. There's a very strong element of madness in this.

Walter Junior, were in the toolshed outside their home in Mars Bluff, South Carolina, when a Mark 6 atomic bomb landed in the yard. Mrs.

Point of view is present in anything I write, but I really try to let the subject and facts speak for themselves.

The executives who run the fast food industry are not bad men. They are businessmen. They will sell free-range, organic, grass-fed hamburgers if you demand it. They will sell whatever sells at a profit.

'Fast Food Nation' isn't about my journey into the dark world of fast food and the prison book is not about my journey into the prison world. I'm not using myself as any kind of narrative link.

It's not a question of McDonald's vanishing from the face of the earth. It's a question of these companies assuming some more responsibility for what they're selling.

And a few months later, an opinion poll found that 54 percent of the American people wanted the United Nations to become a world government with power to control the armed forces of all nations, including the United States.

If you eat, you should be concerned about the people who are providing you with food.

No great monument has been built to honor those who served during the Cold War, who risked their lives and sometimes lost them in the name of freedom. It was ordinary men and women, not just diplomats and statesmen, who helped to avert a nuclear holocaust. Their courage and their sacrifices should be remembered.

To know a country you must see it whole.

The industry doesn't want you to know the truth about what you're eating, because if you knew, you might not want to eat it,

As an investigative reporter, I'm trying to uncover things and expose them to create a dialogue.

Once the Cuban missile sites were operational, Khrushchev planned to announce their existence during a speech at the United Nations. And then he would offer to remove them - if NATO agreed to leave West Berlin. Or

Widespread introduction of the process [of irradiating foods] has thus far been impeded, however, by a reluctance among consumers to eat things that have been exposed to radiation. According to current USDA regulations, irradiated meat must be identified with a special label and with a radura (the internationally recognized symbol of radiation). The Beef Industry Food Safety Council - whose members include the meatpacking and fast food giants - has asked the USDA to change its rules and make the labeling of irradiated meat completely voluntary. The meatpacking industry is also working hard to get rid of the word 'irradiation,; much preferring the phrase 'cold pasteurization.' ... From a purely scientific point of view, irradiation may be safe and effective. But he [a slaughterhouse engineer] is concerned about the introduction of highly complex electromagnetic and nuclear technology into slaughterhouses with a largely illiterate, non-English-speaking workforce.

Whenever power is concentrated and unaccountable - whether it's corporate power, governmental power, or religious power - it inevitably leads to abuses. Human beings are imperfect, and you need a system of check and balances to keep them in line, to encourage good behavior. You need competing centers of power.

I really like hamburgers and French fries, and I don't consider myself some kind of gourmand.

The United States now has more prison inmates than full-time farmers.

A typical workday for me is getting up at about 5:00, 5:15 in the morning, getting some coffee or tea as quickly as possible, and then getting to my desk. And ideally, I'll start writing around 5:30, 5:45, and I'll write for three, four hours, and then I'll take a break, and read over what I write. Maybe about lunchtime, I'll go exercise or get out into the day. Then I'll either read over what I wrote the day before and quit work around 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon and spend some time with my kids.

Sergeant Paul Ramoneda, a twenty-eight-year-old baker with the Ninth Food Service Squadron, was one of the first to reach the bomber.

Fast food is inexpensive, convenient, and it tastes good. I'm all in favor of that. My problem is how heavily processed it is - how full of salt, fat, and sugar it is.

Kids have no idea when they're drinking soda what they're really drinking, and a lot of them are stunned when they learn that drinking a Big Gulp is like taking a big jar of sugar and just pouring it down. There are 50 teaspoons of sugar in a 64-ounce Big Gulp.

One of my favorite dishes in the world used to be steak tartare, which is raw ground beef seasoned and then served.

I can understand why a single parent, working two jobs, would find it easier to stop at McDonald's with the kids rather than cook something from scratch at home.

I was introduced to the world of modern food production in the mid-1990s, while researching an article about California's strawberry industry for the 'Atlantic Monthly.'

The history of the twentieth century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems of state power. The twenty-first will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power.

Did somebody say McUnion? [ ... ] Not if they want to keep their McJob.

One might expect that the families of murder victims would be showered with sympathy and support, embraced by their communities. But in reality they are far more likely to feel isolated, fearful, and ashamed, overwhelmed by grief and guilt, angry at the criminal-justice system, and shunned by their old friends.

Twenty years ago, teenage boys in the United States drank twice as much milk as soda; now they drink twice as much soda as milk.

During my school visits, I really enjoy the feedback I get from them much more than anything I might tell say to them.

The market is a tool, and a useful one. But the worship of this tool is a hollow faith. Far more important than any tool is what you make with it.

Even academic elites are drawn to the figure of the murderer, which has long been a focus of attention for psychiatrists, sociologists, and criminologists.

The fear of murder has grown so enormous in the United States that it leaves a taint, like the mark of Cain, on everyone murder touches.

Studies have found that preparing your own food is usually healthier and less expensive than buying fast food. But most people just don't have the time.

Years ago when I got stuck, I'd start twirling my hair. That's not possible anymore. I can't prove the relationship between writing and hair loss, but I think I pulled out a fair amount trying to work on certain sentences.

I went into the library and read about fast food and became amazed by all the stuff I didn't know. I learned that there is a whole world behind the counter that, it seemed to me, has been deliberately hidden from the public.

I've written about illegal immigrants in the United States; I spent a year following migrant farm workers as they were harvesting. I've written about our criminal justice system, and how it treats the victims of crime. I've been working for years now on a book about prisons in America, and I've been going into prisons and traveling around the country and seeing what's going on.

A nationwide study published by the USDA in 1996 found that [ ... ] 78.6 percent of the ground beef contained microbes that are spread primarily by fecal matter. The medical literature on the causes of food poisoning is full of euphemisms and dry scientific terms: coliform levels, aerobic plate counts, sorbitol, MacConkey agar, and so on. Behind them lies a simple explanation for why eating hamburger meat makes you sick: There is shit in the meat.

If the market does indeed embody the sum of all human wishes, then the secret ones are just as important as the ones that are openly displayed,

General Electric backed the Carousel of Progress, which featured an Audio-Animatronic housewife, standing in her futuristic kitchen, singing about a great big beautiful tomorrow.

The current fast food that we have is inexpensive when you buy it, but the long-term costs of eating it and the long-term costs to society, are much too high. This cheap food, when you add up all the total costs, is much too expensive.

Andropov's concerns were heightened by the Reagan administration's top secret psychological warfare program, designed to spook and confuse the Kremlin. American naval exercises were staged without warning near important military bases along the Soviet coastline; SAC bombers entered Soviet airspace and then left it, testing the air defenses. The

It's possible to go to the market, buy good ingredients, and make yourself a healthy meal for less than it costs to buy a value meal at McDonald's.

Different people, in good faith, can look at the same fact and interpret it differently. But that's where an interesting conversation begins.

The spread of BSE [mad cow disease] in Europe has revealed how secret alliances between agribusiness and government can endanger the public health. It has shown how the desire for profit can overrule every other consideration. British agricultural officials were concerned as early as 1987 that eating meat from BSE-infected cattle might pose a risk to human beings. That information was suppressed for years, and the possibility of any health risk was strenuously denied, in order to protect exports of British beef. Scientists who disagreed with the official line were publicly attacked and kept off government committees investigating BSE. Official denials of the truth delayed important health measures.

Like Hollywood movies, MTV and blue jeans, fast food has become one of America's major cultural exports.

Americans already drink soda at an annual rate of about fifty-six gallons per person – that's nearly six hundred twelve-ounce cans of soda per person.

The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000 ... . Now our food is coming from enormous assembly lines where the animals and the workers are being abused, and the food has become much more dangerous in ways that are deliberately hidden from us. This isn't just about what we're eating. It's about what we're allowed to say. What we're allowed to know.

Some of the most painful and debilitating injuries are the hardest to prove.

The fallibility of human beings guarantees that no technological system will ever be infallible.

Support for a first strike extended far beyond the upper ranks of the U.S. military. Bertrand Russell - the British philosopher and pacifist, imprisoned for his opposition to the First World War - urged the western democracies to attack the Soviet Union before it got an atomic bomb. Russell acknowledged that a nuclear strike on the Soviets would be horrible, but "anything is better than submission." Winston Churchill agreed, proposing that the Soviets be given an ultimatum: withdraw your troops from Germany, or see your cities destroyed. Even Hamilton Holt, lover of peace, crusader for world government, lifelong advocate of settling disputes through mediation and diplomacy and mutual understanding, no longer believed that sort of approach would work. Nuclear weapons had changed everything, and the Soviet Union couldn't be trusted. Any nation that rejected U.N. control of atomic energy, Holt said, "should be wiped off the face of the earth with atomic bombs.

The Golden Arches are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross.

I think it's possible to have food that's healthy, that's good for you to eat, that's also inexpensive. We don't have to have this cheap, unhealthy food being so aggressively promoted.

When you go into a fast food restaurant, you may just think about how good your meal tastes while you're eating it. But you're not thinking about all the consequences that come from that one purchase - the consequences for your body, the consequences for supporting this company and how it's treating it workers, all the way back to the farm where the potatoes were grown, or the ranch where the cattle were raised.

Every step appears as the unavoidable consequence of the preceding one," Einstein said. "In the end, there beckons more and more clearly general annihilation.

There's also a growing trend toward having gardens in schools to literally show kids where food comes from by having them grow and prepare their own food. There's also a movement that's bringing farmers into schools and creating relationships between local farms and local cafeterias, so that instead of frozen mystery meat, you have fresh produce that's coming from the area that has a name and a face associated with it.

In the early days of the project, Teller was concerned that the intense heat of a nuclear explosion would set fire to the atmosphere and kill every living thing on earth. A

I think two different people can read one of my books and come away with completely different opinions on the subject. I hope they just read from the beginning to the end and be made to think about the subject. Then they can come to their own conclusions.

I really like visiting schools, but what I tell students isn't anywhere near as interesting to me as what they tell me.

What we eat has changed more in the last 40 years than in the previous 40,000. The survival of the current food system depends upon widespread ignorance of how it really operates.

The importance of recalls is to show that contaminated meat is getting out the door. And when you look at these recalls, in many ways the most disturbing thing about these recalls is how little of the meat actually winds up back at the plant.

Students can do experiments and investigate for themselves what's going on in restaurants, in our food system, and begin a process of learning.

Take Charge and Move Out (TACAMO) planes would quickly get off the ground, climb steeply, and send an emergency war order on a very-low-frequency radio, using an antenna five miles long. SAC began to develop a Post Attack Command and Control System. It would rely on airborne command posts, a command post on a train, a command post at the bottom of an abandoned gold mine in Cripple Creek, Colorado, and a command post, known as The Notch, inside Bare Mountain, near Amherst, Massachusetts. The

The symptoms of food poisoning often don't appear for days after the contaminated meal was eaten. As a result, most cases of food poisoning are never properly diagnosed.

The obesity epidemic among American children is becoming so bad that I think there's a growing realization across the country that we've got to change what we're feeding our kids and that school may be a really good place to start.

Lowe has broken from the Christianity of his parents, a faith that now seems hopelessly out of date. The meek shall no longer inherit the earth; the go-getters will get it and everything that goes with it. The Christ who went among the poor, the sick, the downtrodden, among lepers and prostitutes, really had no marketing savvy. He has been transfigured into a latter-day entrepreneur, the greatest superstar sales person of all time, who built a multinational outfit from scratch.

Journalists aren't supposed to be cheerleaders.

The federal government has more power to recall a defective stuffed animal who's little glass eye may fall off than to recall contaminated ground beef that could sicken or even kill hundreds if not thousands of people. The meat-packing industry is so powerful that it's managed to prevent the government from having this basic power of recalling a defective product.

I'd been eating fast food all my life without thinking about it. And the more I learned about the subject, the more intrigued I became.

We're all connected by the system, and we all have to be a part, I think, of changing it.

There's a real strong link today between soda consumption and obesity among children.

I try to persuade people to act in ways that are not only in their own interest, but in the interest of society at large.

AT&T's telephone lines and Western Union's telegraph lines were the only direct links between the United States and the Soviet Union. Both of them would be knocked out by a thermonuclear blast, and most radio communications would be, as well. The command-and-control systems of the two countries had no formal, reliable means of interacting. The problem was so serious and so obvious, Schelling thought, everybody must have assumed somebody else had taken care of it. Pauses for negotiation would be a waste of time, if there were no way to negotiate. And

When a worker is injured at an IBP plant in Texas, he or she is immediately presented with a waiver. Signing the waiver means forever surrendering the right to sue IBP on any grounds. Workers who sign the waiver may receive medical care under IBP's Workplace Injury Settlement Program. Or they may not. Once workers sign, IBP and its company-approved doctors have control over the job-related medical treatment - for life. Under the program's terms, seeking treatment from an independent physician can be grounds for losing all medical benefits. Workers who refuse to sign the IBP waiver not only risk getting no medical care from the company, but also risk being fired on the spot...Injured workers almost always sign the waiver. The pressure to do so is immense. An IBP medical case manager will literally bring the waiver to a hospital emergency room in order to obtain an injured worker's signature. When Lonita Leal's right hand was mangled by a hamburger grinder at the IBP plant in Amarillo, a case manager talked her into signing the waiver with her left hand as she waited in the hospital for surgery. When Duane Mullin had both hands crushed in a hammer mill at the same plant, an IBP representative persuaded him to sign the waiver with a pen held in his mouth.

Fast food is popular because it's convenient, it's cheap, and it tastes good. But the real cost of eating fast food never appears on the menu.

Dropping a nuclear weapon was never a good idea.