I was a junior doctor on the front lines when journalist Eric Schlosser published Fast Food Nation 25 years ago.

Back then, my days (and far too many nights) were spent picking up the pieces of a healthcare system that already felt like it was bursting at the seams.

Fast Food Nation pulled back the curtain on the fast-food industry, showing how a system built for speed, efficiency and profit reshaped what Americans eat, how food is produced and the conditions under which many people worked.

More broadly, it revealed the harms of the industrial food system as a whole. The New York Times called it “a fine piece of muckraking, alarming without being alarmist”.