Downstream: How the Democrats Abandoned Working People w/ Eric Schlosser
Novara Media
Novara Media
4.8 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 23 February 2026
⏱️ 71 minutes
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Summary
In 2001, Eric Schlosser published Fast Food Nation: an investigation into the toxic depths of America’s food industry. Twenty five years later, the book remains an urgent intervention, as much for what it says about workers’ rights as for our agricultural systems and dietary health.
On Downstream this week, Ash Sarkar talks to Eric Schlosser about what’s changed since 2001, and what remains unreformed. How have we developed one food system for the rich and another for everyone else? Could the food industry operate – and America eat – without migrant workers? And did Eric foresee that marijuana edibles would become the new fast food?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If you went and got a burger from a fast food joint, it's likely that you make certain assumptions. |
| 0:14.0 | It's not that good for you, a lot of fat, a lot of salt, but at least that beef has come from a cow. That cow ate grass and it |
| 0:23.7 | saw the sun at least once. Well, Eric Schloss's expose of the fast food industry published in 2001 |
| 0:30.8 | called Fast Food Nation has bad news for you. That burger's probably got bits from as many as |
| 0:37.4 | 1,000 different heads of cattle from |
| 0:40.1 | five different countries, all ground up and combined into that patty that you're eating. What's more, |
| 0:47.1 | more than 80% of beef samples found evidence of fecal matter in the meat. So maybe, just maybe, |
| 0:53.5 | you bit off a bit more than you could chew |
| 0:55.4 | with that order of a Big Mac. Personally, I think Eric Schloss's work has been criminally |
| 1:01.1 | misidentified. He often gets stuck with the label of anti-junct food campaigner, but his work is |
| 1:08.3 | actually much more interested in working conditions than it is in salt and fat content. |
| 1:13.8 | Fast Food Nation and his later work like Riefer Madness often starts from looking at changes in workforce composition, |
| 1:22.0 | how they're treated in the factories, what their jobs actually are, and then examines all the downstream consequences of that in terms of our own consumption habits. |
| 1:32.0 | I hope you enjoy the interview, especially the random tangent where we address whether or not he's a Marxist. |
| 1:38.0 | It really was an eye-opening conversation. |
| 1:41.0 | Eric Schlosser, welcome to downstream. |
| 1:43.1 | Thanks for having you. |
| 1:43.5 | Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. |
| 1:45.0 | Fast Food Nation, it's now a penguin, modern classic. |
| 1:49.0 | There are still facts in there which shock me every time I come across them. |
| 1:53.0 | And for the uninitiated, someone who's never even thought about what goes into their food before. |
| 2:02.2 | How did this book come about for you? |
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