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ignoramus,” a “banjo-strumming performer at Farm Aid,” and a “hectoring taskmaster of the nanny state.” The book was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal not by one of the paper’s fine investigative journalists, but by a right-wing member of its editorial staff. Among other things, she accused me of producing a “hodgepodge of impressions, statistics, anecdotes, and prejudices.” A spokeswoman for the American Meat Institute said that my evidence of worker safety problems in meatpacking plants was “anecdotal,” and that I had “vilified the industry in a way that is very unfair.” The restaurant industry did not like Fast Food Nation, either. “In addition to acting like the ‘food police’, and trying to coerce the American consumer never to eat fast food again,” the National Restaurant Association said, “[Schlosser] recklessly disparages an industry that has contributed tremendously to our nation.”

The McDonald’s Corporation also gave Fast Food Nation an unfavorable review. “The real McDonald’s bears no resemblance to anything described in [Schlosser’s] book,” said a company statement. “He’s wrong about our people, wrong about our jobs, and wrong about our food.” Contrary to what McDonald’s executives may believe, a sincere passion for accuracy led me to document every assertion in this book. Although Fast Food Nation has been strongly attacked, thus far its critics have failed to cite any errors in the text. Spokesmen for the meatpacking industry and the fast food industry have shied away from specifics, offering general denouncements of my work and leaving it at that. I am grateful to those readers who’ve taken the time to inform me about typos, misspellings, and other small mistakes. Mike Callicrate — an iconoclastic feedlot owner in Kansas who would make a fine copy editor — pointed out that I’d miscalculated some cattle manure statistics. The error has been corrected.

There is one criticism of Fast Food Nation that needs to be addressed. A number of people have said that I was too hard on the Republican Party, that an anti-Republican bias seems to pervade the book. Fast Food Nation has no hidden partisan agenda; the issues that it addresses transcend party politics. In retrospect, I could have been more critical of the Clinton administration’s ties to agribusiness. Had I devoted more space to the poultry industry, for example, I would have examined the close links between Bill Clinton and the Tyson family. The FDA’s failure to investigate the health risks of biotech foods and its lackadaisical effort to keep cattle remains out of cattle feed also occurred during the Clinton years.

Nevertheless, it is a sad but undeniable fact that for the past two decades the right wing of the Republican Party has worked closely with the fast food industry and the meatpacking industry to oppose food safety laws, worker safety laws, and increases in the minimum wage. One of President George W. Bush’s first acts in office was to rescind a new ergonomics standard, backed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), that would have protected millions of workers from cumulative trauma injuries. The National Restaurant Association and the American Meat Institute applauded Bush’s move. The newly appointed chairman of the House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections, which oversees all legislation pertaining to OSHA, is Representative Charles Norwood, a Republican from Georgia. During the 1990s Norwood sponsored legislation that would have prevented OSHA from inspecting unsafe workplaces or fining negligent employers. He has publicly suggested that some workers may actually be getting their repetitive stress injuries from skiing and playing too much tennis, not from their jobs.

One of the Bush administration’s first food-safety decisions was to stop testing the National School Lunch Program’s ground beef for Salmonella. The meatpacking industry’s lobbyists were delighted; they had worked hard to end the testing, which the industry considered expensive, inconvenient, and unnecessary. But consumer groups were outraged. In the ten