Eric Schlosser Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Fast food chains spend a large amount of marketing to get the attention of children. People form their eating habits as children so they try to nurture clients as youngsters.

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.

Marijuana gives rise to insanity -- not in its users but in the policies directed against it. A nation that sentences the possessor of a single joint to life imprisonment without parole but sets a murderer free after perhaps six years is in the grips of a deep psychosis.

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.

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

Most fast food is fried. Fried food tastes great, and people dont seem to care about the fat aspect.

I think for real change to happen, it's going to have to come from the kids, the community, the teachers, the parents.

Future historians, I hope, will consider the American fast food industry a relic of the twentieth century--a set of attitudes, systems, and beliefs that emerged from postwar southern California, that embodied its limitless faith in technology, that quickly spread across the globe, flourished briefly, and then receded, once its true costs became clear and its thinking became obsolete.

Yes, a cheeseburger and fries is probably my favourite meal. But I don't eat ground beef anymore.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The life's work of Walt Disney and Ray Kroc had come full-circle, uniting in perfect synergy. McDonald's began to sell its hamburgers and french fries at Disney's theme parks. The ethos of McDonaldland and of Disneyland, never far apart, have finally become one. Now you can buy a Happy Meal at the Happiest Place on Earth.