AVC: Have you been able to measure the impact of the book's success?
ES: I really have no idea what the impact of the book has been. I'd like to think it's had some great social, cosmic influence, but I would never claim that. I wouldn't claim it for a minute. I can say this. When I started research on the subject in 1997 for Rolling Stone, there were issues I thought were really important that weren't really dealt with in mainstream media, like marketing to children, the obesity epidemic, the rise of corporate power and homogenization, and all these things. And now, almost 10 years later, some of these things are being discussed in the mainstream media. You have Republican governors like Mike Huckabee in Arkansas and Arnold Schwarzenegger in California kicking the junk food out of the schools and restricting the kind of marketing I wrote about in Fast Food Nation, so there's been a huge thing. McDonald's has some healthy things on the menu, and they reveal how much trans fat is in their food.
Did my book have anything to do with that? I have no idea. All I can say is, there have been changes, and how well-educated and upper-middle-class people are eating is really different. They're not going to McDonald's. They're going to Whole Foods and buying organic. And fast food is increasingly the food of the poor. What I do know is true is this: People will come over to me and tell me that the book had an impact on them, made them think. And that's just great. As a writer, that's just amazing. So the fact that I'm even talking to you about this book, almost six years after it was published, is incredible to me. I had no idea what would happen with it, so it's good in that some people will tell me they liked it and it had an impact on them. That's all I can really measure. Beyond that, who knows?
AVC: The book concludes with the prediction that the 21st century will be marked by the struggle to curtail corporate excess. What's it going to take for that to happen? It doesn't seem that our government officers, on either side of the aisle, are all that motivated to stand up for the consumer or low-level employees.
ES: It's going to take people waking up and realizing how much power a handful of companies have over their lives and our government. Take the whole Hewlett-Packard scandal, for instance. Hewlett-Packard was investigating journalists, spying on journalists. I mean, these companies now behave as though they have their own intelligence agencies. Their own propaganda ministries. It's incredible, and the government is more corrupted by corporate money than it's been since a hundred years ago, in the age of Upton Sinclair. This year's the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Jungle. But there was another really important piece of muckraking called "The Treason Of The Senate" that was published in 1906. It was about how money totally corrupted the U.S. Senate. It's a really strong case of déjà vu. Not that the Democrats are pure in any way, but the right-wing Republican Party is really another wing of these large corporate powers. And lobbyists are writing the bills that Republicans are introducing. It's incredible.
AVC: Have you learned anything from the Best Food Nation website? Has it set you straight? [Bestfoodnation.com is a PR project that touts the American food industry and beats back critics like Schlosser. —ed.]
ES: [Laughs.] It's what I mentioned earlier: ministries of propaganda. I did a talk yesterday at NYU on corporate social responsibility, and it was actually longer than a two-second talk. It led me to look at the tobacco industry and, oddly enough, the lead industry. The dangers of lead paint for children were pretty much established in 1904 or 1906. Lead paint was banned in most of Europe for interior use by the 1920s. But in this country, companies were heavily promoting the use of lead paint for playrooms, schools, and children's bedrooms up until the 1940s or '50s. It's incredible. Looking at the tobacco industry and looking at the lead-paint industry, you see this precursor of Best Food Nation and other sites like that. Which is disinformation and propaganda deliberately being spread to mislead people. I mean, the lead industry just denied it had any impact on children. They claimed this paint was perfectly safe, in the same way the tobacco industry knew its product was addictive and deadly and denied it for a generation. 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.
AVC: For a giant, multi-billion-dollar industry, that site is a pretty pitiful response. What kind of impact could they expect something like that to have?
ES: I have no idea. To be honest with you, I saw it when it came out in May while I was on this book tour [for Chew On This], and I haven't even been back there. But that site lists the companies and organization that put up the money for it, and in a way, I can respect that. It's still full of disinformation, but at least the funders are listed. When I was on this book tour during this spring, however, the Wall Street Journal published an article saying that they had a memo from McDonald's that McDonald's had a plan to discredit me personally, and thus discredit my work. On this tour, there were people planted in the audience who were passing out pamphlets and protesting against me. When I was visiting schools, there were letter-writing campaigns and phone calls saying that I was an improper person to speak to children, and that I was un-American, and all this crazy stuff. The groups who were attacking me were groups like The Young Americans For Freedom or The Center For Individual Freedom or The Heartland Institute. And all these groups seemed to be fronts orchestrated by this Washington PR firm called DCI that McDonald's uses.
And that sort of thing is even more offensive to me than Best Food Nation. It really looked like McDonald's was funding third parties to attack me, and therefore keep the attacks at arm's length from themselves. And that's really anti-democratic. If the head of McDonald's wants to come out and say I'm a loser and my work sucks, at least he's on the record as saying it. But funding legitimate-sounding groups to attack other people, that's really awful. And it's increasingly routine, too. There's one group whose website you should check out called the Center For Consumer Freedom. And they write op-eds all the time, and they're on TV all the time, and you'd think they were a consumer group because of their name. But they're funded by the fast-food industry, by the alcohol industry, by the tobacco industry. And they're opposing New York City's proposed ban on trans fats as being part of a nanny state and food police. And they are creating controversy where there really should be none, and it's just perfectly in keeping with what the tobacco industry and the lead industry did for years.
AVC: Are you concerned that with the release of Chew On This and the film that there'll be fresh threats of lawsuits or unwanted personal attention? When Oprah dared to speak out about cattle, she was hit in a heavy-handed way, and she's a pretty powerful woman. Are you worried about more blowback at this point?
ES: I'd be a fool not to think about those things. 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. But realistically, the McLibel duo [Helen Steel and David Morris] who criticized McDonald's not only were sued, but were investigated for months by private eyes hired by McDonald's. They spied on them while they were preparing their defense for the case. One of these McDonald's corporate spies slept with a Greenpeace activist for six months while obtaining information on them.
That sort of stuff hasn't happened to me. How paranoid am I? I'm not totally paranoid, but in this Hewlett-Packard case, they were obtaining phone records, and they were trying to plant a spy at The Wall Street Journal. I hate to have to think about it. Have they tried to get my credit reports? Have they tried to get my phone records? In the Hewlett-Packard case, they were going through their garbage. I don't know if any of that's been done. I hope that none of that's been done. Would I be surprised tomorrow if I found out they were spying on me? No. I mean, this is the reality, this kind of corporate, as you said, blowback. Very often what they do now is they put up a third party to file the lawsuits, so that a lawsuit wouldn't come from a company itself. It would come from some rancher in South Dakota who thinks I've maligned beef, or something like that. Knock on wood, that hasn't happened yet, but who knows?
AVC: At least in the case of this film, you have a studio behind you, and you have producers and collaborators.
ES: Yeah, but ultimately you are alone. And I'm not saying Fox [which is distributing the film under its Searchlight label], but I'm saying in general how it works with these libel lawsuits, it may be in the interest of your publisher or your studio to settle, and in settling, make a payoff and admit something, where it may be that nothing has been done that's wrong, and there's no reason to settle whatsoever. There are all those other parties, but ultimately, if you care about what you're doing, it's going to fall on you. Oprah's one of the richest women in the United States, and she talks about that lawsuit as one of the worst experiences of her life. Fighting it cost her a couple million. I'm not eager for any of that, but I will say this: If they sue me, I will use that lawsuit as a way of discovery, and I really will enjoy my opportunity to finally talk to some of these executives, and get them deposed under oath. So it goes both ways. But I really would prefer not to get sued, and I really would prefer no one to have my credit report, phone records, or any of that. That's just the occupational hazard of being an investigative journalist these days, and certainly it's nothing like what the journalists in Iraq have to contend with on a daily basis.
AVC: Where are you on the prison book?
ES: I've been working on it for years, going into prisons for years. After the film comes out on November 17, I'll feel like I will have done everything I could on this subject and I will quietly, respectfully withdraw from it and do everything I can to finish my prison book in the next four or five months and then really get involved on those issues.
AVC: Can you say what theses you'll be exploring?
ES: Yeah, it's just a big overview in the same way that Fast Food Nation is, describing how we got to have the biggest prison population in the history of the world in a very brief time. When I was a kid, there were 200,000 people behind bars, and now there's 2.2 million. It's unbelievable. So the book explores how it happened, how it works, and what it's doing to us. I think it's a really important subject. It's incredibly dark. The difficulty I've had is the complexity in structuring it. Also, it's like writing a book on AIDS in Africa among children, in that it's just a heavy, dark subject, and it's hard to do it in a way that's compelling. So that's what I'm doing, and I can't promise it'll be a good book, but I sleep soundly in terms of the importance of the subject matter.
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