Still Supersized: Fast Food Nation at 25

Twenty-five years after it first shook the global food system, Fast Food Nation remains one of the most influential works of investigative nonfiction of our time. To mark its publication in Penguin Modern Classics, Libreria welcomes Eric Schlosser for a wide-ranging conversation about how fast food reshaped what, and how, we eat.

When it appeared in 2001, Fast Food Nation exposed the hidden costs of convenience: labour exploitation, environmental damage, public health crises, and corporate consolidation. Two-and-a-half decades on, some things have changed, including transparency, awareness, alternatives, while others have intensified.

This event looks back at the book’s legacy and forward to the future of food, asking what reform has achieved, where it has stalled, and how sustainability, technology, and power will shape the next chapter of how the world eats.

ABOUT ERIC SCHLOSSER:
Born in New York in 1959 and raised in Los Angeles, he began at The Atlantic and Rolling Stone. From the beginning, his subjects were power and secrecy; the ways corporations, governments, and shadow markets conceal their workings from public view. He writes about labour and justice, giving a voice to invisible workers, be it slaughterhouse employees, migrant pickers, or missile silo technicians, those whose experiences reveal the costs of capitalism. His landmark book Fast Food Nation (2001), now republished as a Penguin Modern Classic with an updated afterword, revealed the fast-food industry as a parable of American capitalism, exposing labour exploitation, public health crises, and corporate consolidation. It became an international bestseller and a foundational text of the 21st century food movement. Reefer Madness (2003) extended his gaze to America’s black markets, while Command and Control (2013), a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the California Book Award, laid bare the terrifying fragility of the nuclear arsenal. The Financial Times as hailed his work as “how non-fiction should be written.” His influence has shaped film as well as print, as co-writer of Fast Food Nation (2006), co-producer of the Oscar-nominated Food, Inc. (2008), and executive producer of There Will Be Blood (2007).

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Libreria Bookshop, 65 Hanbury Street, London, United Kingdom

Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.

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