Eric Schlosser: Congress should ban advertising that preys upon childr...

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.

Eric Schlosser

twenties struggle doubt

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.

Eric Schlosser

cost taste real

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.

Eric Schlosser

sugar favors taste

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.

Eric Schlosser

drinking kids ideas

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.

Eric Schlosser

united-states meals home

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.

Eric Schlosser

survival ignorance years

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

Eric Schlosser

care taste people

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

Eric Schlosser

nutrition important thinking

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.

Eric Schlosser

important tools worship

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.

Eric Schlosser

psychosis marijuana years

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.

Eric Schlosser

library stuff world

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

Eric Schlosser

strong real children

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.

Eric Schlosser

cost add long

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.

Eric Schlosser

country book years

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.

Eric Schlosser

two book thinking

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

Eric Schlosser

restaurants students process

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

Eric Schlosser

real teacher kids

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.

Eric Schlosser

marketing children people

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.

Eric Schlosser

meals body thinking

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.

Eric Schlosser

lines animal years

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.