Fast Food Nation Quotes

It was very interesting [book Fast Food Nation] because all my friends who were in college, [and] this book became almost mandatory for them to read.

The problem with living in a fast-food nation is that we expect food to be cheap.

The organization cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organization.

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.

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.

The United States now has more prison inmates than full-time farmers.

I actually didn't read the book [Fast Food Nation]. I wasn't aware of it. But when I read the script, I thought "Wow." It became a project that was just so exciting to be a part of. Maybe a few times in a career [you] get a chance for a role that really means something, and this was it.

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.

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.

Right afterward I read Fast Food Nation. That book changed my life: It made me a vegetarian.

Doing this movie [Fast Food Nation] made me realize that our bodies are digesting things that it's not meant to digest. It's pretty bad for you. The cast is [now] very, very aware of where we get our food and what we put in our bodies.

Future historians, I hope, will consider the American fast food industry a relic of the twentieth century--a set of attitudes, systems, and beliefs that emerged from postwar southern California, that embodied its limitless faith in technology, that quickly spread across the globe, flourished briefly, and then receded, once its true costs became clear and its thinking became obsolete.

Fast Food Nation was boring and aimed at yuppies, and yuppies don't eat fast food.

Those of us who think about what we eat, how it's grown, those of us who care about the environmental impact of food - we've been educated by fabulous books, like Fast Food Nation and documentaries like Food Inc. But despite these and other great projects that shine a critical light on the topic, every year the food industry spends literally tens of millions of dollars to shape the public conversation about our food system.

In 1970, Americans spent about $6 billion on fast food; in 2000, they spent more than $110 billion. Americans now spend more money on fast food than on higher education, personal computers, computer software, or new cars. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music—combined.

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.

The Golden Arches are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross.

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.

Eric Schlosser's book on the economy and strategies of the fast-food business should be read by anyone who likes to take their children to fast-food restaurants. I shall certainly never do that again. He employs a long, cold burn, a quiet and impassioned accumulation of detail, with calm, wit and clarity. (...) Fast Food Nation is witness to the rigour and seriousness of the best American journalism, readable, reliable and extremely carefully done.