What we eat has changed more in the last 40 years than in the previous 40,000. The survival of the current food system depends upon widespread ignorance of how it really operates.
Eric SchlosserRead
The executives who run the fast food industry are not bad men. They are businessmen. They will sell free-range, organic, grass-fed hamburgers if you demand it. They will sell whatever sells at a profit.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Business practices are driven by consumer demand rather than moral judgment.
This quote highlights the reality that executives in the fast food industry operate as businessmen primarily concerned with profitability. It suggests that if consumers demand healthier and more ethical food options, businesses will adapt to meet that demand, indicating the power of consumer choice in shaping industry practices.
Themes
BusinessConsumer DemandFast FoodMoralityProfit
In practice
Example use cases
During a business ethics lecture about consumer influence on industry standards.
More from Eric Schlosser
All quotes →Marijuana gives rise to insanity -- not in its users but in the policies directed against it. A nation that sentences the possessor of a single joint to life imprisonment without parole but sets a murderer free after perhaps six years is in the grips of a deep psychosis.
Eric SchlosserRead
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.
Eric SchlosserRead
Similar quotes
True reflection presents me to myself not as idle and inaccessible subjectivity, but as identical with my presence in the world and to others, as I am now realizing it: I am all that I see, I am an intersubjective field, not despite my body and historical situation, but, on the contrary, by being this body and this situation, and through them, all the rest.
Maurice Merleau-PontyRead
Crisis alone is not enough. There must also be a basis, though it need be neither rational nor ultimately correct, for faith in the particular candidate chosen.
Thomas KuhnRead
Truly, there is a Christian note which makes the whole World vibrate, like an immense gong, in the divine Christ. This note is unique and universal, and in it alone consists the Gospel.
Pierre Teilhard De ChardinRead
Good technique includes quick changes, great variety and speed. It may be a system of reversals much like a concept of God and the Devil. In the speed of events, which one is really in charge? Do they change places with lightning speed? The Chinese believe so. To put the heart of the martial arts in your own heart and have it be a part of you means total comprehension.
Bruce LeeRead
Everyone, when there's war in the air, learns to live in a new element: falsehood.
Jean GiraudouxRead
We get stressed out now by having somebody yell at us in the office or by making a mistake or by losing a bunch of money. These aren't problems that our hunter-gatherer ancestors had. They'd get stressed if a lion came to them or a boulder was rolling towards their living quarters. That kind of stress provoked the fight or flight response.
Daniel LevitinRead