Charles Dickens raised the social issues alarm during the industrial revolution when he published Hard Times in 1854. Over fifty years later in 1906, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle led to improvements for meatpackers in Chicago’s stockyards. Since 2001, Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation has been changing the way Americans thing about how they eat.

Fast Food Nation: the dark side of the all-American meal is a groundbreaking investigative work and cultural history which began as an article in Rolling Stone. In a new book for pre-teen readers, Schlosser reveals Chew on This: everything you don’t want to know about fast food, including gross-out facts to surprise and scare readers. Plus, check out the 2006 movie adaptation Fast Food Nation.

If fast food isn’t your thing, check out these new, notable and revealing books about the ethics behind modern food production.

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma: a natural history of four meals by Michael Pollan, modern agriculture makes it difficult to see the ethical, environmental and monetary cost of the foods in our supermarkets, but Pollan tours a corn farm, a feedlot, an organic farm and a sustainable agriculture farm to show us the hidden costs and help us make informed choices. In The Way we Eat: why our food choices matter by Peter Singer, the man who started the animal rights movement with his book Animal Liberation now tries to convince us to shop with principle, and provides a field guide to ethical shopping.

Or if you like the upbeat and quirky stories behind popular foods, read more books about food habits or food preferences.