25 years ago, the book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal went pre-internet viral. In it, investigative journalist Eric Schlosser pulled back the curtain on the American fast food industry.
“The real price of cheap food,” wrote Schlosser, “doesn’t appear on the menu.”
The book – which started as a multi-part Rolling Stone article in 1998 and inspired a Richard Linklater film a few years later – explored several aspects of the industry: The assembly-lineation of food production, poor labor conditions, dangerous and contaminated slaughterhouses, and a multi-billion-dollar flavor industry that hires chemists as “flavorists.”
In doing so, it fundamentally altered Americans’ understanding of their own eating habits and relationship to food. By unveiling the fast food industry as not just another harmless American convenience, but a massive market with endless machinations requiring political, ethical, and health considerations, it shaped the public consciousness.
That was clear in future investigations it inspired, including Morgan Spurlock’s documentary Super Size Me – in which he ate only McDonald’s for 30 days – and Food, Inc., which featured Schlosser and Michael Pollan as narrators and was nominated for an Academy Award.
It’s safe to say that Big Fast Food wasn’t happy. Schlosser suffered intimidation campaigns – including threats and planted questions at his book signings – that at times required him to travel with armed security. Once, in a Tucson parking lot, a man even attacked him and accused him of not loving his country.
I first heard about Fast Food Nation from an unlikely source: My 5th-grade cousin. I was in 2nd grade at the time, and I looked up to Andrew. One night during the holidays, he convinced my twin brother and me to make a cheeky rap song about it, which we posted on MacJams.com (remember that?).
So of course while writing this, I had to text him. Today he lives on a homestead outside Eugene, Oregon, where he forages, lives off the land, and is opening a cidery (which he writes about here). I asked him if he remembered the rap. Of course, he said, and texted me the entire thing from memory. Here’s a snippet:
Them fast food burgers are full of grease
Eat too much you’ll get obese
Those burgers are really nasty and gross
After eating it feels like a drug overdose**cowbell and GarageBand sounds**
Them fast food burgers are full of grease
Eat too much you’ll get obese
Their food is full of fat and oil
And it makes my taste buds recoil
Today, Andrew is more in touch with food, land, and nature than almost anyone I know. If this instant recollection of a song written 25 years ago tells me anything, it’s that Fast Food Nation stuck with him in some fundamental way. Here’s what he said:
Reading that was the first time I’d seen the curtain pulled back on an aspect of life that everyone accepted as normal, and I was horrified by it. It was kind of a gateway drug to skepticism about a lot of our institutions, and it made it clear how profit – not people’s well-being – was the main driver of business in America. I swore off fast food forever, and I truly haven’t touched it since (the exception, of course, is In-N-Out, since the book said it wasn’t as bad).
When I was growing up, it’s safe to say there was nowhere near the amount of awareness and general conversation about health, food, etc. Today, arguably, health awareness has never been higher. So it’s odd to think that my relatively healthy parents regularly bought sugary foods like Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Pop-Tarts for breakfast, and Lunchables, bottles of SunnyD, and Oreos for lunch. But I’ve asked around to my friends, and many of them had a similar-looking lunchbox.
When revisiting Fast Food Nation for this piece, what struck me was how early our relationship with fast food begins, and all because the marketing is specifically targeted to us when we’re young. Think about it – who sells kids food? Not a man in a suit. It’s lovable characters (Ronald McDonald, the Hamburglar, the Burger King), the Happy Meal toys, the in-store playgrounds. Cereal boxes with free computer game CD-ROMs hidden inside sugary flakes.
McDonald’s led the way for fast-food chains in this regard. Ray Kroc, the man who spearheaded McDonald’s early expansions, learned from a friend and fellow Red Cross WWI ambulance driver: Walt Disney. Disney identified children as the perfect unsuspecting conduit into adult wallets, a blue ocean of opportunity. Kroc followed suit.
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So now that 25 years have passed since Fast Food Nation, have Schlosser’s findings changed anything?
On one level, no. In 2000, Americans spent around $110 billion on fast food. In 2025? $390 billion. 32% of adults have fast food on a given day, and the number of quick-service restaurants has risen from 285,000 in 2000 to around 375,000 last year.
On another level, kind of. When looking back on the book’s impact earlier this year for The Guardian, Schlosser considered Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) and Trump’s war on ultra-processed foods – over half of what Americans consume. While MAHA’s criticism is similar to Schlosser’s in some ways – the food industry is too industrialized and consolidated – the movement focuses more on what’s inside the food rather than where it comes from.
Specifically, Schlosser was tickled by Trump’s hand in all of it:
If a politician who drinks 12 Diet Cokes a day, serves McDonald’s food at the White House, stages campaign events at McDonald’s restaurants – and routinely orders a meal of two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fish sandwiches and a chocolate shake just for himself – now feels the need to criticise industrial food, a seismic shift has occurred in US popular opinion.
At the core of Schlosser’s book, though, was a warning of the dangers of uncontrolled corporate power. He surfaced the behind-the-scenes realities of food production that these corporations wanted to keep tucked away from the average consumer. But 25 years later, consolidation of food companies has only increased, many through mergers and acquisitions (think: Kraft merging with Heinz in 2015). Today, major processors are even larger and use fewer but more enormous processing plants. Take a look at these stats cited in The Guardian:
Five companies control about 70% to 90% of the worldwide trade in grains. Four companies control more than 80% of the US supply of beef, 70% of its pork and 60% of its market for chicken. Four companies control about 75% of the US market for yoghurt, 79% of its market for beer. Three firms control 93% of the US market for carbonated soft drinks.
So we still have a lot of work to do. But what Fast Food Nation did was give people the information to begin questioning the status quo. We’re more aware than we were then, that’s for sure. And, like for my cousin, Schlosser got people to consider where a burger originates before it appears on our plates.
Editor’s Note
Has your relationship with food changed in the past 25 years? Do you find yourself eating fast food more or less than you used to? Send in your thoughts here or leave a comment below.
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—Max and Max
Hey I'm famous! Maybe I'll celebrate with some McDonalds
Fast Food Nation did change my life; it led me to vegetarianism and then veganism and healthier eating overall.