Civil Eats

Safe and sustainable: we need our food to be both, and nowhere has the case been made better than in the Academy Award-nominated documentary, Food, Inc. Earlier this month, Consumers Union, long a proponent of safe, sustainable food, hosted an Activist Summit in Washington, D.C. which featured two of the film’s leading voices: Barbara Kowalcyk, who lost her two-year-old son to beef suspected of contamination with E.coli 0157:H7, and whose struggle for tougher food safety laws is documented in the film, and Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, and the film’s co-producer. Read More

Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (2001) is, in many ways, still fueling food policy discussion in America. A ground-breaking expose on the fast food industry and a critique of the modern food system, Fast Food Nation was a New York Times best-seller for nearly two years, evolved into a movie in 2006, and inspired the Oscar-nominated documentary Food Inc (2009). Read More

CBS Evening News’ Katie Couric spoke with former FDA Commissioner and author of The End of Overeating, Dr. David Kessler, and Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser for her online discussion this week, called @KatieCouric. The topics ranged from portion sizes to school food, the push back from industry on Couric’s segment last week on non-therapeutic antibiotic use in agriculture, and to other issues of food policy and food safety. The discussion is nearly fifty minutes long, and well worth watching. Here are a few highlights: Read More