Analysis Of The Oil We Eat By Richard Manwin

Richard Manning Wrote the essay “The Oil We Eat – Following the Food Chain Back to Iraq” which was published in Harper’s Magazine February 2004 edition. In this essay, Manning discusses the evolution of agriculture and the consequences of it. Furthermore, Manning explores the relationship of fossil fuel, food calories and transfer of energy to illustrate earth’s prospective future. Through the use of charismatically presented factual arguments, visual powerful emotional narratives and the credibility of a few choice names, Manning creates an environment in his essay that allows flaws to escape otherwise unknown to majority reader.

In order to lay the basis of the environment Manning wants to create, he has introduced a tone that allows him

For some people the numbers and facts don’t really matter, they read through Manning’s description of extinction and focus on the conclusion he created. Others will focus blindly on the increased extinction rate and rue the day mankind was created. But, there is one group of people who will see “before human domination” (pg. 1) and lose their scientifically accurate minds. Manning is unknowingly referring to the ratio between the background extinction rate and the actual distinction rate, i.e. what scientist think is the extinction rate right now with humans vs. no humans, and referring to it as if it is two completely different rates at two completely different points in time. Small flaws like these are insignificant to the average reader but comparable to kryptonite to credibility from a scientific audiences view. Throughout the essay, these inaccuracies consistently occur, those who know the law of thermodynamics know is not the same as energy transformation in a food-chain and that the scientific method that you simply can’t make conclusions drawn from two different fields of inaccurately portrayed science based on your opinion and call it

For instance, the use of Plato to begin to compare agricultural technics that are centuries apart does not only create a point of reference for the reader as well as a visual narrative that has an emotional appeal in comparing once beautifully fertile land to that of a skeleton of a sick man. Although this argument has strength in its composition and pathos appeal, logically and realistically the problem Plato describes is easily solved by grading of the earth, and the problem in Europe Manning moves on to in the middle ages is relying on a narrow source of food as well as bad management. This argument then becomes irrelevant as modern agriculture is well aware of the cause, consequences, and solution to such a problem and the risk of such problems to arise again. This entire section is formed to create doom and gloom, however improbable, as well as it does not properly explore the aspects of developing technology or circumstance that have the most significant impact on this particular