Quotes from Eric Schlosser

It's not a question of McDonald's vanishing from the face of the earth. It's a question of these companies assuming some more responsibility for what they're selling.

I try to persuade people to act in ways that are not only in their own interest, but in the interest of society at large.

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.

I think there could hardly be a more important subject than health and nutrition.

I hadn't planned on being an activist.

The symptoms of food poisoning often don't appear for days after the contaminated meal was eaten. As a result, most cases of food poisoning are never properly diagnosed.

Students can do experiments and investigate for themselves what's going on in restaurants, in our food system, and begin a process of learning.

Moser was a great believer in checklists.

The combination of a short range and a powerful thermonuclear weapon was unfortunate. Launched from NATO bases in West Germany, Redstone missiles would destroy a fair amount of West Germany.

The impact of McDonald's on the way we live today is hard to overstate. The Golden Arches are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross.

When news of the false alarm leaked to the press, the Air Force denied that the missile warning had ever been taken seriously. Percy, who later became a Republican senator from Illinois, disputed that account. He recalled a sense of panic at NORAD. A subsequent investigation found the cause of the computer glitch. The BMEWS site at Thule had mistakenly identified the moon, slowly rising over Norway, as dozens of long-range missiles launched from Siberia.

One historian has described the federal government's 1950s highway-building binge as a case study in "interstate socialism"—

Today approximately three-quarters of all $100 bills circulate outside the United States.

The fallibility of human beings guarantees that no technological system will ever be infallible.

Non a McMerde.

And a few months later, an opinion poll found that 54 percent of the American people wanted the United Nations to become "a world government with power to control the armed forces of all nations, including the United States.

Democrats in Congress whipped up fears of Soviet missiles and attacked the Eisenhower administration for allowing the United States to fall behind. The

What we eat has changed more in the last forty years than in the previous forty thousand.

A series of tests conducted by Charles Gerba, a microbiologist at the University of Arizona, discovered far more fecal bacteria in the average American kitchen sink than on the average American toilet seat. According to Gerba, 'You'd be better off eating a carrot stick that fell in your toilet than one that fell in your sink.

The federal government has the legal authority to recall a defective toaster oven or stuffed animal—but still lacks the power to recall tons of contaminated, potentially lethal meat.

Unlike other commodities, however, fast food isn't viewed, read, played, or worn. It enters the body and becomes part of the consumer. No other industry offers, both literally and figuratively, so much insight into the nature of mass consumption.

Like Cheyenne Mountain, today's fast good conceals remarkable technological advances behind an ordinary-looking façade.

Whenever power is concentrated and unaccountable - whether it's corporate power, governmental power, or religious power - it inevitably leads to abuses. Human beings are imperfect, and you need a system of check and balances to keep them in line, to encourage good behavior. You need competing centers of power.

The Air Force's demand for self-contained, inertial guidance systems played a leading role in the miniaturization of computers and the development of integrated circuits, the building blocks of the modern electronics industry.