Is obesity the next big American political issue? With one Republican presidential hopeful, Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, gaining national recognition for his personal weight loss and collaboration with former President Clinton to keep sweets out of school, it's possible. One person responsible for raising public awareness of the issue is Eric Schlosser, an award-winning journalist and modern-day Upton Sinclair who penned Fast Food Nation in 2001, a blistering expose of the dark side of the fast food industry: health risks, horrific working conditions and industry efforts to market directly to children.

Now, Schlosser is back with a fast food follow-up, Chew on This, a similar expose written with Charles Wilson; it focuses particularly on the dangers of fast food for children. But Schlosser is now set to reach an even larger audience: In the coming months we'll see a film based on Fast Food Nation, directed by Richard Linklater and featuring big name stars like Patricia Arquette, released across the country. Since we couldn't convince him to sit down with us over a burger, Campus Progress chatted with Schlosser over the phone.

Campus Progress: Fast Food Nation was a dramatic wake-up call for a lot of young people about foods we had all grown up eating. What inspired you to write that book?

Eric Schlosser: Well, I didn't come to it out of any great hatred for fast food, I used to eat it all the time. I did a big investigative piece at The Atlantic Monthly. It was about illegal immigration, it was about farm labor, migrant farm workers, and I told a very complicated story through something simple and concrete: a strawberry. We love strawberries and we eat lots of strawberries, and we eat lots of strawberries without ever thinking that each one of those strawberries has to be picked by hand. So, you want a lot of strawberries, you need a lot of hands. And that article was read at Rolling Stone magazine, and they invited me in to do the same thing for fast food.

Basically, they wanted me to go behind the counter and show all the complex systems that bring you this heavily processed food. I didn't jump at the opportunity because I eat fast food, and I didn't want to write something condescending and elitist putting down the industry, but the more I learned, the more amazed I was, and what was incredible to me was that I would be eating this food all the time without thinking about it, without having any idea where it came from or how it was being made.

Campus Progress: As a writer, I have to tell you the lead to that book is just incredible. You start out in a military base ...

ES: ... Cheyenne Mountain. One of our most top secret military bases, which is inside a hollowed-out mountain in Colorado.

Campus Progress: How do you come up with something like that?

ES: You know, it's not always premeditated. A lot of it comes out of the reporting. I was looking for a place to set Fast Food Nation, and Colorado sounded really interesting to me. It felt like, with the whole conservative religious fundamentalist culture, it was at the cutting edge of change in America. Little did I know how much that culture would take over America.

I decided to set it in Colorado Springs. There are these big military bases, so I applied to visit the base. And while I was there I started talking to them about what they eat there and it just blew my mind that, at that point, and I'm sure its no longer true post 9/11, the Domino's Pizza delivery guy would come right up to the gate at one of the most top-secret, important military installations in the United States. [If] you can get Domino's delivered to the Cheyenne Mountain air station, fast food has really infiltrated every part of American life.

Campus Progress: Tell us a little bit about your new film based on Fast Food Nation and whether you and Morgan Spurlock have a rivalry.

ES: Firstly, Morgan Spurlock: He made a totally disgusting film, but a really funny film. There's no rivalry whatsoever. As a matter of fact, we have a standing agreement that I will testify in his behalf when he gets sued by the industry, and he has promised to testify in mine.

The film that's based on Fast Food Nation is totally different from Super Size Me, and I love Super Size Me. This film is a fictional film, it's an independent film made by a wonderful director, Richard Linklater, who did Slacker and Dazed and Confused. It takes the title of my book and some of the themes but pretty much puts aside the book. There's nobody in the book who's literally in the film. The film is about the lives of some intersecting characters in a small town in Colorado, a lot of the film is in Spanish, some of the crucial characters are illegal immigrants, and in some ways it's an updating of [Upton Sinclair's] The Jungle on the hundredth anniversary of the publishing of that book.

Campus Progress: Why did you write your new book, Chew on This?

ES: Chew on This is aimed at kids, and it's aimed at the people who the fast food industry is heavily targeting with its mass marketing. When I finished Fast Food Nation and the manuscript was all done, I hired a fact-checker from TheNew Yorker, Charles Wilson, and his job was to make sure that every fact was right ... . He came to me with the idea of doing a children's book based on Fast Food Nation, arguing that these kids are being targeted by the fast food industry, they need the same sort of information in Fast Food Nation, and they need an alternate view of the world than the one they're getting from all these ads. So it sounded like a good idea, and I recruited him to help me with it.

Campus Progress: What do you think of the recent announcement of several major soda companies, including Coke and Pepsi, to stop selling their products in elementary and high schools come this fall, and why they might be motivated to do that?

ES: I'd like to think that they were motivated solely by concern for the health of American children. But, whatever their motivations are, I think it's a good thing. The deal was brokered by former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, and the current governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, a conservative Republican. I think it's a terrific step because it shows bipartisan support for ensuring that kids are eating healthy food in schools. I don't think it's an ideal agreement; it's going to be phased in over a number of years [and] it's a voluntary agreement. But to me it's a sign of the times, a sign that attitudes are really changing and there's a real feeling growing that we can't afford to have these companies marketing unhealthy food to kids in schools. I applaud the move by the soda companies to make voluntary changes, but I also support moves at the state and federal level to put tough restrictions on what kind of food can be sold in schools.

Campus Progress: Fast Food Nation sold extremely well; it raised a lot of awareness. Have you seen any improvement in the issues you talk about, like exploitative labor practices at fast food restaurants and the meatpacking plants that supply them?

ES: In the five years since the book was published, a lot has changed for the better and some things have changed for the worse. I'm not going to claim credit for my book being responsible for all this, but nevertheless things have changed. One of the ways things have changed is there's much more awareness about food. In the last five years there has just been a huge increase in organic production, the sale of organics. Whole Foods is one of the fastest-growing, most profitable food distributors, and they represent a whole different set of values from what McDonald's and KFC do. So you're seeing a big change in eating habits among well-educated people and upper middle class people, and that's good.

There's also a lot more awareness about obesity and the obesity epidemic, which really didn't seem to be discussed much five years ago and now is a huge, huge subject of debate and concern. Cutbacks on soda in schools, Governor Schwarzenegger kicking the junk food and the soda companies out of school, all that is good.

When it comes to worker safety and workers rights in the American meatpacking industry, I think things are much worse than they were five years ago, thanks mainly to the Bush administration, which is very close to the meatpacking industry. I went to Texas after Fast Food Nation was published to interview meatpacking workers there; those are some of the worst conditions I've ever seen. The food safety issues, I think, have gotten much worse, again, because the Bush administration is so close to the meatpacking industry. This isn't a Republican or Democratic issue, ideally, it's a non-partisan issue. Republicans and Democrats both have to eat. Unfortunately, a lot of money flows in Washington from this industry to certain politicians. There's been a real backslide, I think, in food safety measures.

One thing that I also think is worse is the eating habits of the poor and ordinary working people. As the obesity epidemic is growing in this country, it's mainly growing among people at the very bottom. These are the main consumers of fast food. Fast food is increasingly the food of the poor. What I'm hoping to see in the next five years is the same changes in eating habits that have occurred among the well-educated and the upper middle class now need to be extended throughout society, especially for the people at the bottom who are suffering the worst health effects of this food.

A small minority of American industrialists never accepted the New Deal. In particular, they viewed our basic retirement insurance program, Social Security, as un-American. The journey of the anti-Social Security agenda from a fringe idea, disparaged by mainstream conservatives, to its modern apotheosis in this year's frightening privatization effort is ably chronicled by columnist Joe Conason in his new book The Raw Deal: How the Bush Republicans Plan to Destroy Social Security and the Legacy of the New Deal.

Conason explains how a few multimillionaires funded far-right think tanks that relentlessly pushed for the abolition of Social Security, cleverly re-branding the effort in terms of "privatization" and then "personal accounts." These ideas migrated from the far-right to the mainstream. Or was the mainstream migrating to the far-right? In any case, we interviewed Conason, whose writing appears regularly in Salon.com and The New York Observer, and who can be heard every Friday from 2 to 3 p.m. on the Al Franken Show on Air America Radio, to shed some light on this and other issues.

Obviously, you conceived of this book when Social Security was under a much more immediate threat than it is right now. Do you think that Social Security privatization will be attempted again, and could you hazard a guess as to when?

The urge to privatize or abolish Social Security is a generational goal of conservatives. It's something that they have wanted to do since the very beginning of the program seventy years ago, and it comes in waves - the first big wave was the Goldwater campaign in 1964, which was defeated, to a degree, on this issue.

The second wave was an attempt when Ronald Reagan became President, and that was defeated because progressives controlled the House of Representatives, led by Tip O'Neil, and stopped any notion of cutting or privatizing Social Security then.

Twenty years later, George W. Bush became President, and the conservatives behind him were, I think, even further to the right than Reagan, were determined to do that during his presidency. Clearly they've had two setbacks - one when the stock market tanked in 2001 after the Social Security Commission had tried to come up with a privatization plan - and now, following the last election, he tried again and it has, so far, failed again. I have no doubt that they will keep after this. The one thing you can say about conservatives, particularly this generation of conservatives, is that they're extremely determined to achieve their goals. They're very self-confident, and they have a strong belief in what they're doing, and they happen to be backed, in this case, by the powers financially. My guess, then, would be that if they maintain control of both houses of Congress next year that they will come back to this within the term.

Clearly there was a mobilization effort around this issue that seemed pretty effective. What would you suggest is the most effective way to try to stop the privatization campaign, should it come around again?

The mobilization that took place last year around this issue was effective because those who might have wavered on this issue, really in either party, have been held to account very specifically by activists. In other words, I'd say if there's a member of Congress in Florida or Pennsylvania who had said, "I think privatization is a good idea" or "I might vote for that," that information was immediately transmitted to a large network of activists who then mobilized people to let that member know that that was an unacceptable position. In my view, it worked. What it meant was that you had a block of members of Congress who were not going to move on that issue.

So if Social Security privatization comes up again the way to prevent it is to flood the wavering congressmen and senators with emails?

Well, other ways too. If they show up at a town meeting, be there. Phone calls, letters to the editor - all of the tactics that were used by progressive organizations, specifically the Campaign for America 's future, AFL-CIO… Rock the Vote was involved, a lot of groups got involved - there was a broad spectrum of tactics that were used to try to make it clear that not only were most people opposed to this idea, but they would not forget a member who would try to do this.

You were a very articulate defender of President Clinton during the impeachment hearings. Now you have conservatives looking very hypocritical saying that perjury isn't really such a big crime. Obviously, you can speak to that, but I'm also wondering if you could speak to the reverse accusation - that you are taking a harder line with Scooter Libby.

There's a difference between thinking that perjury is a serious crime and that President Clinton perjured himself, and that even if President Clinton perjured himself in the Paula Jones case, that that was an offense meriting impeachment. I don't think anyone is calling for President Bush or VP Cheney to be impeached over this matter yet.

Secondly, what is the nature of this perjury - what is it about? President Clinton was tried for perjury in the Senate and found not guilty. So, to me he had to pay a fine, he was disbarred for a period in Arkansas, he did not escape the embarrassment or sanction for lying about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. I don't think he should have escaped sanctions for it - I believed he should have been punished for what he did, but not impeached. If Scooter Libby lied before the grand jury and before the FBI in order to protect a conspiracy to expose Valerie Plame's identity, he should be punished. I don't have the slightest qualms about that. The hypocrisy is completely on the other side where people once told us that no matter how insignificant the underlying reason for the lie is, even if we have a perjury trap and invade someone's private life, that they should answer to the full consequences of that before the law, to now say that perjury and obstruction of justice are not important crimes here - that's absurd! It's hard for me to imagine that they can go on television and say this without laughing.

You talk a lot in the book about how Social Security privatization was an idea that's been hatched and nurtured by right-wing think tanks over the years. What do you see as the major progressive policy shift that we should be pushing?

The most important thing right now is what's called the Apollo project. It's the transition to a different kind of economy. All the benefits that would flow from that, not just for the environment, but for employment, for health - this is what I think is the fundamental project of this generation - weaning ourselves from the petroleum and carbon-based economy and figuring out how we're going to have economic growth and raise standards of living around the world without destroying the planet in the process.

You go on the Al Franken show. Do you think that liberal talk radio is successful thus far, and if not, do you think that there's something about the way it's being done that's causing it to fail? Do you think that a little more anger from the left to mimic the right might be more effective?

Air America, I think, is doing well - it will improve and do better. People should keep in mind that it took a while for Rush Limbaugh to catch on. It took a really long time for Fox News to. I also think the fact that the right is so angry about Air America already…it's a really good sign.

Hurricane Katrina raised awareness about the desperate poverty that so many residents of the Gulf Coast in Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana live in every day. But John Edwards has been talking about American poverty since long before Katrina made landfall.

After a career of representing individuals against corporations in personal injury suits, he ran for the Senate from his native North Carolina and won. Six years later, in 2004, he ran for president, making poverty alleviation and greater equality a central theme of his campaign, and he continued to do so as the Democrats' nominee for Vice-President.

Now he is pursuing those objectives as director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and as Honorary Chair of the Center for Promise and Opportunity in Washington DC.

Tell us a little about your Project Opportunity college tour, why you think it's necessary, what you want it to accomplish and how?

Well, my view is that after Hurricane Katrina we have an extraordinary opportunity. The country is hungry to do something about poverty, not only on the Gulf Coast , but in America. And so many times in my life I have seen what impact students and young people can have. I saw it in the 1960s when I was a teenager -- when students led the fight for civil rights and they spoke out against the war in Vietnam. They had a huge impact on their own country, not just for that time, but forever. And I think we have that kind of opportunity available to us now.

So what I'm gonna do is go to ten college campuses to get young people engaged in fighting against poverty: to get 'em to come to the event that we have on campus, and to commit to at least up to twenty hours of community service, and to advocate for policy ideas, projects, that can do something about poverty in America. Actually in some campuses we're focused on community service and others we're focused on advocacy for policy ideas.

We have ten campuses, on every campus we have a core group of students who are doing the organizing, getting people to the event and helping determine what it is in the community we're gonna ask young people to do. So bottom line is, we're gonna get more students, more young people involved in their communities, and find that they can make a change in poverty.

In light of all the reports of voter disenfranchisement in Ohio and other swing states what are the steps you think we need to take to make sure that every vote is counted next time?

What I think is more important than focusing on the last election is focusing on moving forward and on what we should do to make sure our election system works the way it should. I think there was a lot of evidence and a lot of anecdotes in our last election about the voters being unable to cast their votes. We know there were people in Ohio that had to wait many hours just to be able to vote, while people in other areas, in some cases in more affluent communities, were able to vote in minutes -- that's not the way our election system is supposed to work. These are also some of the things we saw in the 2000 elections, particularly in Florida.

We have important work to do to make sure that everybody is confident that when they go to the polls, they'll be able to vote, and they'll be able to cast their vote in a reasonable amount of time, and they will be certain that the vote they cast was counted. Those things include making sure that we have the resources in place, particularly in poor voting precincts, to have adequate equipment -- it means making sure that we have an audit trail for the voting process.

Beyond that, I think we should take the election process out of the hands of partisan politicians and instead set up non-partisan election officials and election boards to monitor what's happening so that we know that the election process works appropriately. We live in what is supposed to be, to the rest of the world, a shining example of democracy. And we also live in the most prosperous area on the planet. There is no reason for anyone, in the process of our elections, to have a question about whether their vote counts.

What do you think students should do, especially southern progressive students, to counter the conservative influences on their campuses?

Well, we've heard a lot of talk about moral issues. Some people use that language to divide America. The truth is that poverty is the great moral issue that faces our country, here, within our own borders. The fact that we have 37 million people who live in poverty is wrong, morally wrong, in a country of our wealth. Some people think about this as, you know, they lump everybody who lives in poverty together, and they think of this as charity.

Here's the truth: the truth is that people who live in poverty fall in one of two categories: they either have serious bills or physical disabilities. For those people, helping them get by is in some ways charity, because we believe as Americans that that's what we should do. For the rest, and that's the majority of people who live in poverty, they are either employed or employable. For those folks, it's not about charity. It's about fairness and justice, because the rest of the country depends on them to provide the services they provide, whatever jobs they have.

I think what we want to do, I grew up in a rural town in the South, is give people a fundamental sense of fairness, of justice -- that it's not right for people to be working two jobs, in some cases, both parents -- in a two parent family, two parents are working two jobs -- they're working four jobs between the two parents -- it's not right for them to be doing that and not be able to at least provide a minimum standard of living for their family. So, I think talk about this as a moral issue, and talk about it as a fairness issue, because I think most people, whether they're a Democrat or Republican, will be responsive to that.

We were also wondering if you could talk to us about your College for Everyone program in North Carolina that you launched a few weeks ago.

This is an idea that I talked about in my own presidential campaign. The idea is that any young person who has taken college prep work, who is qualified to go to college, and has stayed out of trouble, and is willing to go to work ten hours a week will be able to go their first year of college completely for free -- tuition, books etc, paid for.

And what we've done to test the validity of this idea is found a place in eastern North Carolina , one the poorest counties in North Carolina , but the community is committed to doing something about their kids having a chance. And what we've done is, in Greene County, privately, we've raised the money for it to implement the program. In Greene County if you have taken all the prep courses, not gotten into trouble and commit to work ten hours a week, then your tuition and books will be paid for. The idea is many young persons who would not have gone to college will get a chance to go.

We've seen some numbers in recent articles saying that the income level at which a white family is more likely to vote progressive than conservative has been dropping from about $50,000 to $25,000 per year in the last three presidential elections. When progressives such as yourself are putting forward an economic platform that is beneficial to white working class families, why do you think it is that they aren't voting for you? And what can progressives in general do to alleviate that? What might you do if you're thinking about running in 2008?

Let me talk in general about what I think it's important for progressives to do. I think first of all to the key to success in today's political world is exhibiting strong leadership. People are worried about jobs, healthcare, and safety, and certainly worried about the war in Iraq and the impact it's having on our country and the people serving there. For all those reasons people want leaders who exhibit strength. Strength comes from conviction. Strength does not come from looking at yesterday's poll to figure out what it is we're supposed to say. We need to stand up with strength and backbone for what it is we believe in.

If the country sees that confidence in our leadership they will follow, because the reality is that what people care most about -- jobs, healthcare -- they trust us more than they trust the other side. They have to see that we will not walk away from our core beliefs whether they are popular or unpopular. And one indication of that is our willingness as a party and as a political movement to stand for doing something about poverty in this country.