Top 100 Eric Schlosser Quotes
#1. 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.'
Eric Schlosser
#2. Democrats in Congress whipped up fears of Soviet missiles and attacked the Eisenhower administration for allowing the United States to fall behind. The
Eric Schlosser
#3. Today the U.S. government can demand the nation-wide recall of defective softball bats, sneakers, stuffed animals, and foam-rubber toy cows. But it cannot order a meatpacking company to remove contaminated, potentially lethal ground beef from fast food kitchens and supermarket shelves.
Eric Schlosser
#4. And workers who needed to go to the bathroom weren't allowed to take a break. They were forced to pee right on the slaughterhouse floor, near meat that people would soon be eating.
Eric Schlosser
#5. Hey, I used to eat at McDonald's: I liked the taste of the food, especially the French fries.
Eric Schlosser
#6. 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.
Eric Schlosser
#7. 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.
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#8. Like Hollywood movies, MTV and blue jeans, fast food has become one of America's major cultural exports.
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#9. I really like visiting schools, but what I tell students isn't anywhere near as interesting to me as what they tell me.
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#10. The fallibility of human beings guarantees that no technological system will ever be infallible.
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#11. We're all connected by the system, and we all have to be a part, I think, of changing it.
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#12. 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
#13. I think there should be very strict limits on the pathogens that can be sold in your meat. There should be limits on disease-causing pathogens. Tests should determine whether the meat is contaminated or not, and you shouldn't be allowed to sell contaminated meat.
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#14. Some of the most painful and debilitating injuries are the hardest to prove.
Eric Schlosser
#15. Very few people realize that the U.S. government does not have the power to order the recall of contaminated meat.
Eric Schlosser
#16. 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.
Eric Schlosser
#17. 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.
Eric Schlosser
#18. Americans not only smoke more marijuana but also imprison more people for marijuana than any other western industrialized nation.
Eric Schlosser
#19. I never consciously set out to model myself after Upton Sinclair.
Eric Schlosser
#20. I'm all in favor of animal rights, but I'd like to see the food movement take a much stronger stand in defense of basic human rights. If you're a vegan or a vegetarian, you should care about the people who are picking your fruits and vegetables by hand.
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#21. 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.
Eric Schlosser
#22. We can have Americans eating affordably and eating in a way that's sustainable.
Eric Schlosser
#23. 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.
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#24. 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.
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#25. I really like hamburgers and French fries, and I don't consider myself some kind of gourmand.
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#26. 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
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#27. I'd like to think that, in the United States, you can criticize a company that makes hamburgers without having to worry about what might happen to you.
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#28. 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,
Eric Schlosser
#29. '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.
Eric Schlosser
#30. McMahon predicted that "total power in the hands of total evil will equal destruction." The
Eric Schlosser
#32. 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.
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#33. Yes, a cheeseburger and fries is probably my favourite meal. But I don't eat ground beef anymore.
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#34. McDonald's revolutionized fast food. They introduced a way to eat food without knives, forks or plates. Most fast foods can be eaten while steering the wheel of a car and the restaurants are usually drive through.
Eric Schlosser
#35. 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
#36. 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.
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#37. 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.
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#38. I think for real change to happen, it's going to have to come from the kids, the community, the teachers, the parents.
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#39. 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.
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#40. 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.
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#41. By birth and upbringing, I think I'm emotionally resilient. I don't feel like I'm a depressive person.
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#42. 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.
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#43. Students can do experiments and investigate for themselves what's going on in restaurants, in our food system, and begin a process of learning.
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#44. 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.
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#45. 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
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#46. I've been called communist, socialist, anti-American.
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#47. We cannot ignore the meaning of mad cow. It is one more warning about unintended consequences, about human arrogance and the blind worship of science.
Eric Schlosser
#48. 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
#49. 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.
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#50. By the way, I'm not a vegetarian. I have a lot of respect for people who are vegetarian for religious or ethical reasons.
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#51. One of my favorite dishes in the world used to be steak tartare, which is raw ground beef seasoned and then served.
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#52. Point of view is present in anything I write, but I really try to let the subject and facts speak for themselves.
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#53. 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.
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#54. The United States now has more prison inmates than full-time farmers.
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#55. 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.
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#56. Did somebody say McUnion? [ ... ] Not if they want to keep their McJob.
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#57. 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.
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#58. As an investigative reporter, I'm trying to uncover things and expose them to create a dialogue.
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#59. '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.
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#61. 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.
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#62. 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.
Eric Schlosser
#63. I find that one of the most important things, as a writer, is to just show up - to just stay in the chair and fight through the difficult patches. As long as you're at the desk, and you're willing to fight it out, eventually the right words will come.
Eric Schlosser
#64. Even academic elites are drawn to the figure of the murderer, which has long been a focus of attention for psychiatrists, sociologists, and criminologists.
Eric Schlosser
#65. 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.
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#66. 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.
Eric Schlosser
#67. 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.
Eric Schlosser
#68. 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.
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#69. During my school visits, I really enjoy the feedback I get from them much more than anything I might tell say to them.
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#70. 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.
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#71. 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.
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#72. 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.
Eric Schlosser
#73. The Soviet Union welcomed the new system. At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, urgent messages from the Soviet ambassador in Washington had been encoded by hand and then given to a Western Union messenger who arrived at the embassy on a bicycle.
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#74. 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.
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#75. The fast-food industry is in very good company with the lead industry and the tobacco industry in how it tries to mislead the public, and how aggressively it goes after anybody who criticizes its business practices.
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#76. 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,
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#77. If you eat, you should be concerned about the people who are providing you with food.
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#78. The Golden Arches are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross.
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#79. 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.
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#80. 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.
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#81. 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.
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#83. Most fast food is fried. Fried food tastes great, and people don't seem to care about the fat aspect.
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#84. 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.
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#85. Today approximately three-quarters of all $100 bills circulate outside the United States.
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#86. The smallest attack option would hit the Soviet Union with almost two thousand weapons; the largest with more than three thousand. The vast scale and inflexibility of the SIOP led Kissinger to describe it as a horror strategy.
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#87. There's a real strong link today between soda consumption and obesity among children.
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#88. Sergeant Paul Ramoneda, a twenty-eight-year-old baker with the Ninth Food Service Squadron, was one of the first to reach the bomber.
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#89. Whatever replaces the fast food industry should be regional, diverse, authentic, unpredictable, sustainable, profitable
and humble. It should know its limits.
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#90. 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.
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#91. A public outcry usually masks a private obsession.
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#92. 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.
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#93. I think there could hardly be a more important subject than health and nutrition.
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#95. 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.
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#96. Different people, in good faith, can look at the same fact and interpret it differently. But that's where an interesting conversation begins.
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#97. 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.
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#98. As a matter of fact, most cases of food poisoning are never linked back to their source.
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#99. 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.
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#100. 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.
Eric Schlosser
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