Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation blew the lid off the industrial food system – exposing how it destroyed landscapes, widened the gap between rich and poor, fuelled an epidemic of obesity and spread its harms throughout the world.

He visited the labs that create the taste of processed food, spoken to workers at meatpacking plants with horrific safety records, explored the tactics used to target ever younger customers with junk food and revealed the links between Hollywood and the fast food trade.

Now, twenty-five years later, he joins us live in conversation in London to reveal what’s changed and what hasn’t over the past few decades, showing how the corporate forces he first criticized are even more ruthless today. Don’t miss this terrifying and explosive account of the cost of our appetite for instant gratification.

Speakers:

Eric Schlosser is the author of Fast Food Nation (2001), Reefer Madness (2003), Command and Control (2013), and Gods of Metal (2015). Command and Control was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. He’s helped to produce numerous films, including Fast Food Nation, There Will Be Blood, and Food, Inc. Two of his plays, Americans and We the People, have been staged in London. He is currently at work on a book about prisons.

Zing Tsjeng is a journalist, author and the host of the award-winning BBC Sounds podcast Good Bad Billionaire. She is a columnist for the i newspaper and writes for publications including British Vogue, the Guardian and Style magazine.