Eric Schlosser Audiobooks

Fast Food Nation: the investigation that changed how a country reads a menu

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.4/5 average

2,417 listener ratings

Who is Eric Schlosser?

Investigative journalism of the old, slow, expensive kind is Eric Schlosser‘s trade. Born in New York in 1959 and educated at Princeton and Oxford, he came up through magazines, writing for The Atlantic, Rolling Stone and The New Yorker, and won a National Magazine Award before his first book ever appeared.

That book was Fast Food Nation, which began as a two-part piece for Rolling Stone and grew into a years-long examination of an industry nobody had yet looked at on that scale. He followed it with Reefer Madness, on the American black market, and Command and Control, a forensic reconstruction of a nuclear weapons accident in Arkansas that was a Pulitzer finalist.

His method never changes: pick a system everyone uses and nobody inspects, spend years inside it, then report it without hectoring. The politics emerge from the evidence rather than being laid over the top, which is why the books have outlasted their news cycles.

Eric Schlosser in audiobooks

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal runs to twelve hours and travels from the potato fields of Idaho to the kill floor of a Colorado meatpacking plant by way of a flavour laboratory in New Jersey, where the smell of a strawberry milkshake is assembled from scratch.

It is the chapter on labour, rather than the one on hygiene, that tends to stay with listeners, and the rating here has held above four stars across thousands of reviews. The book changed what a generation expected to know about its food, and enough of it remains true that the anger has not gone stale.

Listen on a long drive, ideally not one that involves a motorway service station. The listing is below.