When Eric Schlosser expanded his Rolling Stone article on fast food into 2001's bestselling book Fast Food Nation, he created the country's most comprehensive and widely read exposé of the industry. This year, that material has been adapted anew twice over: In May, Schlosser and co-author Charles Wilson released Chew On This, a book that frames the same information for kids, and Schlosser and director Richard Linklater have collaborated on an ambitious film version of Fast Food Nation that puts the book's facts into a fictionalized dramatic context. Schlosser also wrote 2004's Reefer Madness, a three-pronged examination of the American black market, and he's currently working on a book about the prison-industrial complex. Schlosser recently spoke to The A.V. Club about Fast Food Nation's various incarnations, the industry's attempts to squelch its critics, and the government's complicity with corporate interests.
The A.V. Club: How did the idea of a feature adaptation of this book come about?
Eric Schlosser: I was approached by Jeremy Thomas, this British independent-film producer who really does interesting stuff and works with a lot of good European directors. He approached me with the idea of doing this film after having been given the book by Malcolm McLaren, the impresario behind the Sex Pistols. I didn't immediately see it. This was about a year and a half after the book came out, and I spent that time trying to get a documentary made based on the book, and meeting with a lot of documentary filmmakers. It had not been successful, because I did not want to sign over the rights of the book and see something that was a real sellout and a compromise. That was before Bowling For Columbine showed that documentaries could have a real theatrical life, so I was meeting with documentary filmmakers who were associated with various networks. And I liked the filmmakers, but I felt uneasy. McDonald's sponsors Sesame Street, and even PBS was coming under a lot of pressure from the Bush administration, so I had in my mind decided that I'd rather have no film made based on the book than something that really watered it down or smoothed over the sharp edges. It was around then that Jeremy Thomas and Malcolm McLaren came in with the idea of a fictional film based on the book. I thought, "Wow, it's great to meet these guys." Jeremy's a legendary producer, and Malcolm is brilliant and charismatic. I didn't sign over the rights to the book, but I said I'd think about it. And when I was on a book tour in Austin, Texas, I sat down with Richard Linklater, and we started talking about it, and thought it could be interesting. We then spent about two years, on and off, getting together and talking about it. I signed over the rights once it was clear Rick really wanted to do this, and that he'd have total creative control, and Jeremy Thomas would raise all the money outside the studio system. Then I could sleep soundly on it, because in my generation, Rick is one of the two or three American directors whose work I totally respect and admire. I just wanted to see a film of his based on the book. So that's how it happened. An unlikely thing, but I think in the film world, the director's key, and if the director's in power to make the film he or she wants to make, maybe something interesting will happen. If the documentary filmmaker was in power in the same way, that could have been interesting in a totally different way, but this is how it happened.
AVC: What was the writing process like? Many people probably don't realize that you have a background in playwriting, but had those muscles atrophied?
ES: Well, like I said, I really wanted to just see what Rick would do with this book. And this isn't bullshit, but I would have been fine with whatever happened. Once Rick was clear he wanted to do this, and once it was clear he would have final cut and creative control, I would have been happy giving him the book and showing up a year later to see the film. But I wound up being much more involved than I planned to be. It started out by me simply taking him around Colorado and introducing him to ranchers, and taking him into a slaughterhouse and just giving him a sense of a subject. He wanted me to stay involved, and it was such a pleasure. We sat in the room with index cards, plotted the whole thing out, and wrote it together in the room with a laptop. Then he went off and wrote some scenes and I wrote some scenes, and it was just a pleasure. I started out as a playwright, and then I worked for a film company in New York, and I had a play in London a few years ago. It was fun to make something up. And I'm not quitting my day job at all. The investigative reporting I do, I love the writing, but the footnoting and fact-checking, the libel review, and everything is just… It was just very different from this. It was great. To be able to work with one of the best screenwriters at the moment, which is also Rick, it's just good.
AVC: When you were first researching the book, did you encounter a lot of resistance, or were you able to fly under the radar?
ES: You know, I was really straight about what I was doing. 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. So for everything I do, I'm very clear about what I'm doing, and I tell people what it's about. They get a sense of what I'm thinking. I don't let people think I'm going to write something in praise in the meatpacking industry, and then they read it and it's actually attacking the meatpacking industry. By and large, people were really good in letting me in. The only people who were not good were McDonald's and the big fast-food chains and the meatpacking companies. So wherever I went, I was invited in, except for the slaughterhouse that I wrote about in the book. I just felt I really needed to go into a slaughterhouse. So I got in there on somewhat disingenuous terms.
AVC: Was McDonald's actively trying to stop you?
ES: No, they would just never agree to any interview, and I think it was extremely petty. When the book was done, I hired a fact-checker from The New Yorker to ruthlessly go over it and argue at every contention of fact. I wanted it to be accurate on all kinds of levels, and I also didn't want to be sued. McDonald's executives refused to be interviewed and refused to be helpful in any way. But then, once the book was finished, my fact-checker called up the company and said, "Okay, I want to go over the book with you and make sure it's accurate." And they wouldn't participate in the fact-checking process. I was able to get, through a source, the phone number of McDonald's corporate archivist. They have their own corporate historian, and it's full-time. And I was able to get past the PR people and call her up and say, "Look, we want to make sure that this is accurate, and it would be really great if you could spend the time to make sure the facts are straight." I think it was in their interest [to participate in the fact-checking process], because they would have gotten a real preview of coming attractions. They would have been able to get a real strong sense of what the book was about months and months in advance, but no one would do it, so that's the way it goes.
AVC: The book is prismatic in the way it ropes together health, labor, and corporate control. Was it difficult to achieve that balance without digressing too far off course?
ES: It was really hard, and in many ways, that was the hardest part of the process for me. I wanted to write something that was complex. I wanted to write something that used this industry as a way of literally looking at changes in the United States, but also as a symbol and a metaphor for other kinds of changes. So it was really complicated, and the vast majority of what I learned never wound up in the book. There were all kinds of other tangents that I went off on that I wound up cutting for the book. I'm writing a book on prisons right now, and it's the same big challenge for me, The challenge is to write something that's complex and that brings in so many diverse subjects, and yet isn't a total fucking mess, and is a pleasure to read. Knowing when to stop is the crucial thing I wrestle with. Those books, the prison book I'm working on and Fast Food Nation, they aren't chronologically structured, and they don't have a familiar kind of narrative. 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. So it's very complicated to structure and to pull everything together without it just flying apart. I don't want to whine too much, because this is what I've chosen to do, and I really like my work. But that's the hardest part of what I do.
AVC: What avenues did you start to explore that you avoided because the book would seem lopsided?
ES: Well, not lopsided. I just had to be ruthless in cutting it, and ruthless in making sure that it all held together. There were all kinds of things I thought about writing, and there were all kinds of things I researched and didn't write about, but the one thing I wrote and then cut from the book was a fairly big section on genetically modified foods, and how they came to be approved in the United States. It's a really scary story. There's a government official who was put in charge of figuring out how to introduce genetically modified foods, and whether they need a separate regulatory classification, or they can just be dumped on the marketplace, which is what ultimately happened. The man in charge of the safety of our environment and our bodies with this totally new kind of food was Dan Quayle. He was head of the committee to figure out how to introduce this genetically modified food. And I made the point in the section that I cut from the book that here's a guy who couldn't even spell "potato," in charge of introducing a genetically modified potato. This is true. And this whole genetically modified food section all centered on genetically modified potatoes that were turning into McDonald's French fries. And then McDonald's announced that they would stop using genetically modified potatoes for their French fries, and that kind of got rid of any pretext that I could use to write about genetically engineered food. Once McDonald's chose to make that decision—which was a great decision that they deserve credit for—I had to cut the whole section from the book, because there was no justification for it anymore.
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