Eric Schlosser Quotes

Food has become such an interesting issue in the nation and the world.

I think it's important for children to know where their food comes from and how much work it takes to produce the items we eat in our home.

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.

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

Without food, we cannot survive, and that is why issues that affect the food industry are so important.

When you went into a Boston Chicken and ordered quarter-chicken, white, with mash and corn, when that was rung up, that would signal all the way along the supply chain the need for more potatoes to be put on a truck a thousand miles away.

My food hero has to be Auguste Escoffier. And the villain? The man who's been most responsible for the death of food in my time is Ronald McDonald. He's always scared me, I think he's evil - he's a wolf in sheep's clothing. Him and the Hamburglar.

I've been a foodie most of my life. I started when I lived for a year in Germany in my early 20s, and here was this new food environment, and I decided I needed to make sense of it. And I found it was the rules of economics that do the best job. Food is a capitalist product of supply and demand.

Chefs are at the end of a long chain of individuals who work hard to feed people. Farmers, beekeepers, bakers, scientists, fishermen, grocers, we are all part of that chain, all food people, all dedicated to feeding the world.

How is the government going to run without people like us? We make 35 percent of the bread in this country, and that much of the margarine, and cooking oil, and all the other things.

We're the biggest food and agriculture company in the world.

There is a deliberate effort to undermine food culture to sell us processed food. The family meal is a challenge if you're General Mills or Kellogg or one of these companies, or McDonald's, because the family meal is usually one thing shared.

If we're eating industrially, if we're letting large corporations, fast food chains, cook our food, we're going to have a huge, industrialized, monoculture agriculture because big likes to buy from big. So I realized, wow, how we cook or whether we cook has a huge bearing on what kind of agriculture we're going to have.

We all know that Ray Kroc founded the McDonald's franchise back in the 1950s, and it then became the most successful business enterprise in history.

Food never ends. It's one of the greatest things about working on food - we're always going to need food.

With the Industrial Revolution, the production of food was delegated to big companies in order for women and men to be in the labour force, to come home, stick something in the oven, and eat. It became a big industry that does not have a love affair with food nor is really concerned about nurturing you or giving you the right nutrition.

They make documentaries like 'Fast Food Nation.' The food our kids are eating in schools, the vending machines kids go to a lot, the portions of food that American restaurants are serving that are bigger than anywhere else in the world - it's kind of crazy.

I always wanted to write a book about a common food that becomes a commercial commodity and therefore becomes economically important and therefore becomes politically important and culturally important. That whole process is very interesting to me. And salt seemed to me the best example of that, partly because it's universal.

We have a more intimate relationship with food than with almost anything else we buy, so people are with very good reason concerned about the real story behind what they eat.

Eleven million people in America work in the restaurant industry - and then when you start figuring in the farmers, the cheese makers, the wine people, all the other industries that support the restaurants, you're talking about a much bigger number.

Well, I wasn't a big Chick-fil-A fan, I guess, I never really knew about them because I'm from Philly and they don't have them there.

McDonald's released a new video showing how it makes their Chicken McNuggets. Apparently it turns out that McNuggets aren't made out of chicken. They're made out of people who ask too many questions.

People may hope that the meat they buy came from an animal who died without pain, but they do not really want to know about it. Yet those who, by their purchases, require animals to be killed do not deserve to be shielded from this or any other aspect of the production of the meat they buy.

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.

Food consists not just in piles of chemicals; it also comprises a set of social and ecological relationships, reaching back to the land and outward to other people.