ERIC SCHLOSSER: UNDER THE SKIN

Eric Schlosser, Bestselling Scourge Of The Junk-Food Chains, Has Turned His
Gaze On Other Favourite Vices.

He Tells Boyd Tonkin About The True Cost Of America's Cheap Thrills

Over the past year, one sight has grown almost as common on London's public
transport as the litter of burger bags that spreads daily through each tube
and bus. Somewhere amid this tide of detritus, an engrossed reader will be
devouring the literary antidote to junk culture and junk cuisine.

During 2002, Eric Schlosser's history-cum-polemic Fast Food Nation sold
almost 200,000 copies in its UK paperback alone.

Along with Naomi (No Logo) Klein and Michael (Stupid White Men) Moore, the
investigative journalist makes up a sort of ad hoc triumvirate of north
American dissidents. Their vastly popular works can occasionally look like
the strongest global opposition to the dominion of Dubya.

"I wouldn't presume to say that my book or any book can have a long-term
effect," says the painstaking sleuth who found - and made - big cracks in
the empire of Big Macs. "What I can say is that I've met people who have
been affected by it. As a writer, that's enormously gratifying." The reborn
activism that seized on his queasily compelling expose of the filth behind
the fries makes a change from the torpor of Schlosser's own youth: "I was
at university during the Reagan and George Bush the First years.

It could not have been a deader, more apolitical, more materialistic
generation."

We talk in a coolly tasteful meeting-room, high in Penguin's pharaonic
Thames-side headquarters. As with Moore and Klein, Schlosser's
anti-corporate agenda has touched its followers across the world courtesy
of the globe-spanning media giants.

But touch them it certainly has. Fast Food Nation captured, and
intensified, a mood of visceral disgust with tainted and tasteless branded
fodder.

The backlash has forced McDonald's itself to raise its PR game through the
pursuit of cattle-friendly ranches and organic milk suppliers.

Schlosser suspects this greener-than-thou campaign might be too little, too
late: "I really do believe that this industry and this phenomenon has
peaked and is in decline." He points out that "in the States - certainly
among the educated middle classes - the fast food chains have lost their
allure". Elsewhere, burger diplomacy has backfired. "I don't like
anti-Americanism, and I don't want to feed into anti-Americanism," he says,
"but the incredible anti-Americanism throughout the world at the moment
does not help McDonald's at all. They have worked so hard to wrap
themselves in the American flag and present themselves as the embodiment of
the American dream.

Now they're paying the price." Closer to home, his own children - aged 12
and 10 - thrive in spite of a parental ban on junk meals.

Besides: "They have not been ostracised or suffered any social opprobrium
as a result of their refusal to eat fast food."

Schlosser - a bejeaned, crop-haired and youthful 43 - has now shifted his
gaze to guilty passions that may prove more durable than the craze for
quarter-pounders with cheese.

He has just published his second scrutiny of the unsavoury ingredients that
helped to make modern America. Reefer Madness (Allen Lane, UKP10.99)
collects three detailed explorations of the commodities that his
fellow-citizens "publicly abhor, privately adore, and buy in astonishing
amounts": pornography, marijuana, and illegal Mexican migrant labour.

Today, revenues from porn match Hollywood receipts and exceed sales of
rock. Some 20 years after Reagan's "War on Drugs" began, marijuana
cultivation has probably overtaken corn - worth $19bn annually - as the
nation's most lucrative cash crop. In Los Angeles County, 28 per cent of
all workers are paid in untraceable cash: "a triumph of underground
practices and values". Everywhere you look, the underground has flooded the
mainstream.

Together, these essays build into a secret history of America's favourite
vices.

Through Schlosser's rich landscape of research and reportage, there threads
a winding stream of argument about the proper role of the free market, the
law and the state.

This wrangle over the wages of sin never goes in a straight line. "Things
are complicated," the author admits. "I've really tried, in Fast Food
Nation and this book, to convey the complexity of the world and not fall
back on dogma or slogans." With Albert Camus, he shuns the ideological
quick fix and praises "thought that knows its limits".

In keeping with this motto, Schlosser writes not tracts but tales.

He composes gripping contemporary history, as full of drama as of data.
Indeed, he studied history at both Princeton and Oxford, and tried his hand
at fiction and plays before two editors at the Atlantic Monthly gave him a
journalistic break.

Around its core ideas about the development of consumerism, Fast Food
Nation wove the stories of key individuals, from Ray Kroc himself - the
Californian entrepreneur who first saw the potential of the McDonald
brothers' burger business - to the Latino meatpackers who sweat and suffer
in the deregulated hell of the processing plants.

In Reefer Madness, we meet underground men such as Mark Young - jailed for
life as go-between in a small-time dope deal - and the strawberry-picker
Francisco, hiding out with Mexican villagers "like criminals or the Viet
Cong" so that Californian fruits can grace the nation's tables at a price
only slave wages permit.

Most remarkable of all is Reuben Sturman: unchallenged kingpin of the US
pornography business from the 1960s until the government managed to jail
him on a tax-evasion charge in 1992. Half monster, half martyr, Sturman -
whom Schlosser met in the prison he treated like a country club - leaps off
the page with the coarse grandeur of some protagonist out of Bellow or Roth.

Sex attracted Sturman hardly at all: "He could have been selling aluminium
foil." A shrewd Ohio wholesaler, he drifted into the smut trade almost by
accident, discovered that it paid, but quickly fell foul of the law. These
days, Schlosser notes that "On Channel 4, on a typical evening, you'll see
things so much more lurid than what Sturman was repeatedly indicted for in
the Sixties". In 1964, the exasperated Sturman dared to sue J Edgar Hoover,
all-powerful chief of the FBI. That insolence triggered an often farcical
game of cat-and-mouse between pornographer, police and tax authorities,
which lasted for three decades and stretched from LA to Zurich. Schlosser
decided to "follow the money". The labyrinthine paper trail allows him to
piece together an amazing non-fiction narrative.

It binds sex, law, cash and politics into a very American chronicle of
hubris and nemesis.

Both hardcore libertarians and strict state interventionists will find
something to perplex them in Reefer Madness. On pot, Schlosser supports
decriminalisation on the mild European model but argues that the swift
legalisation of drugs "would perfectly play into the wild bi-polar swings
in our culture.

To go from giving life without parole to someone for a small roach to
having [tobacco firm] Philip Morris being able to market Acapulco Gold on
TV ... would be crazy." I can't avoid asking about his personal interest in
Cannabis sativa. "I have inhaled. I'm not a current user," he replies.

Then, fairly, he throws the question back at me. My answer would be the same.

On porn, Schlosser defends the freedom of consenting adults to produce and
consume it, but stresses the legacy of prior abuse and addiction that
drives so many performers. "When you watch contemporary porn," he warns,
"you are very often watching a woman in the process of self-destruction."
The same conscience that led him to denounce the misery of the meat-packing
plants also burns in the breezeblock studios of the San Fernando valley:
"If you're concerned about the rights of ordinary working people, you
should be concerned about the women in pornography." A sane state policy on
age restrictions might help, for a start.

At the age of 18, he reports, "in California, you're not allowed to buy a
beer, but you can have sex with 15 men on film."

Schlosser has not finished with the shadow side of American life. His next
project will complete a trilogy that aims "to understand the history of the
last 30 years". The book will wrestle with a beast whose power dwarfs that
of the Golden Arches: the US prison system. This vast carceral industry now
houses 2 million-plus inmates.

Among them are tens of thousands of the innocuous pot-heads whose
heartbreaking histories we hear in Reefer Madness. One of America's wars
may have ended lately.

What Schlosser calls its "war on nonconformists" is inflicting heavier
casualties than ever.

Biography

Eric Schlosser, 43, was born in Manhattan and grew up there and in Los
Angeles. He studied American history at Princeton; then British imperial
history at Oxford. He worked for a film company in New York, where he was
"reasonably successful, but unhappy", and was able to embark on a career as
a journalist thanks to supportive editors at the Atlantic Monthly in
Boston. A two-part article for Rolling Stone provided the impetus for his
first book, in 2001. Fast Food Nation (Penguin) proved a runaway success in
the US and Britain. His magazine investigations into migrant labour, porn
and pot form the basis of Reefer Madness (Allen Lane). Eric Schlosser lives
in Manhattan with his wife and children, Mica and Conor.