One of the most shocking books of the generation is Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation. The novel includes two sections, "The American Way" and "Meat and Potatoes,” that aid him in describing the history and people who have helped shape up the basics of the “McWorld.” Fast Food Nation jumps into action at the beginning of the novel with a discussion of Carl N. Karcher and the McDonald’s brothers. He explores their roles as “Gods” of the fast-food industry. Schlosser then visits Colorado Springs and investigates the life and working conditions of the typical fast-food industry employee. Starting out the second section, Schlosser travels to the western side of Colorado to examine the effects presented to the agriculture world in the new economy. Following Schlosser’s journey across the nation, he leads everything up to slaughterhouses and the main supply of income for fast food franchises – the meat. After visiting the meat industries in America, Schlosser explores the expansion of fast food around the eastern hemisphere – including the first McDonalds in Germany. Throughout Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser presents in his point of view and informative tone, a detailed disscussion of the conditions using various examples imagry and flowing diction/syntax to help support and show his audience the reasoning behind the novel. To fully understand Fast Food Nation, the reader must recognize the audience the novel is directed towards, and also the purpose of it. Eric Schlosser’s intention in writing this piece of literature was to inform America of how large the fast food industry truly is, larger than most people can fathom. Schlosser explains that he has “written this book out of a belief that people should know what lies behind the s... ... middle of paper ... ...o one in its industry wants to speak up about. Schlosser wanted to inform the audience and make sure that those conditions that low wage workers are oppressed by are revealed to the rest of the society and taken into consideration. He was extremely successful in displaying this throughout his novel because all the details he includes to pull on the heart strings of the reader. Overall, he demonstrated wide writing skills that are unique to only Schlosser himself. Works Cited Pothukuchi, Kameshwari. "Book Review of Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal(Eric Schlosser, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001." U-M Personal World Wide Web Server. Web. 19 May 2011. . Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Print.
Eric Schlosser enters the slaughterhouse in the High Plains to show behind the scenes of fast food and how it is made. He was not expecting what actually lies behind the cold doors of the factory. People remain to have the misconception of fast food being made in the restaurant. Nobody thinks about there being a dark side to it all. Schlosser pulls on his knee high boots and guides readers through a pool of blood to show where we manufacture our food.
Over the last 50 years, the fast food industry did not only sold hamburgers and french fries. It has been a key factor for vast social changes throughout America. It has been responsible for breaking traditional American values and reinstating new social standards that specifically aims to benefit the industry’s growth. These social standards have inevitably changed the way the American youth respond to education and self-responsibility. Eric Schlosser, an author of Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, excellently uses logic to present the tactics used by the fast food industry to cheapen and promote labor along with the social changes that occurred in the American youth as a result. Schlosser aims to dismantle and dissect
The central argument of fast food nation by Eric Schlosser is that the large restaurant chains and corporations and their demand for unification have given these chains too much power over America’s food supply, economy, and society. Also the way that these corporations operate is now the framework for today’s retail economy. Small businesses are going bankrupt because of the franchising that the large companies are pursuing.
Almost everyone has eaten fast food at some point in their lives, but not everyone realizes the negative effects some fast food can have on our nutrition. My family especially is guilty of eating unhealthy fast food meals at least once a week because of our budget and very busy schedules. In Andrea Freeman’s article entitled, “Fast Food: Oppression through Poor Nutrition,” She argues that fast food has established itself as a main source of nutrition for families that live in average neighborhoods and have low-incomes. Freeman begins the article by explaining how the number of fast food outlets is beginning to grow in poor communities because of the cheap prices and quick service these restaurants are famous for. The overabundance of fast
Fast food nation is divided into two sections: "The American Way", which brings forth the beginnings of the Fast Food Nation within the context of after World War Two America; and "Meat and Potatoes", which examines the specific mechanizations of the fast-food industry, including the chemical flavoring of the food, the production of cattle and chickens, the working conditions of the beef industry, the dangers of eating this kind of meat, and the international prospect of fast food as an American cultural export to the rest of the world. Chapter 1 opens with a discussion of Carl N. Karcher, one of fast food’s pioneers. Carl was born in 1917 in Ohio. He quit school after eighth grade and spent long hours farming with his father. When he was twenty years old, his uncle offered him a job at his Feed and Seed store in Anaheim, CA.
Tone: The author’s tone in Fast Food Nation is very informative with also an entertainment side. Throughout the book, Eric Schlosser is always giving facts about different things, but along with the facts comes excitement and entertainment. Eric Schlosser uses this strategy to keep the audience in check. In other words, to keep the person who is reading the book interested. Many authors use this kind of tone to their story because if they don’t, then people would stop reading their work, but instead, the reader wants to get to the interesting facts and keep on
In Fast Food Nation, Schlosser goes beyond the facts that left many people’s eye wide opened. Throughout the book, Schlosser discusses several different topics including food-borne disease, near global obesity, animal abuse, political corruption, worksite danger. The book explains the origin of the all issues and how they have affected the American society in a certain way. This book started out by introducing the Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station beside the Colorado Springs, one of the fastest growing metropolitan economies in America. This part presents the whole book of facts on fast food industry. It talks about how Americans spend more money on fast food than any other personal consumption. To promote mass production and profits, industries like MacDonald, keep their labor and materials costs low. Average US worker get the lowest income paid by fast food restaurants, and these franchise chains produces about 90% of the nation’s new jobs. In the first chapter, he interviewed Carl N. Karcher, one of the fast food industry’s leade...
Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. New York: Perennial, 2002.
Fast food has changed farming, ranching, and meatpacking to an extent where it is nearly impossible to recover due to the amount of meat that is being consumed in the United States and the amount of meat that are required to prepare those products in America and other foreign countries. The author of Fast Food Nation stated, “Ranchers currently face a host of economic problems: rising land prices, stagnant beef prices, oversupplies of cattle, increased shipments of live cattle from Canada and Mexi...
In the book Fast Food Nation: The Darks Side of the All-American Meal, Eric Schlosser claims that fast food impacts more than our eating habits, it impacts “…our economy, our culture, and our values”(3) . At the heart of Schlosser’s argument is that the entrepreneurial spirit —defined by hard work, innovation, and taking extraordinary risks— has nothing to do with the rise of the fast food empire and all its subsidiaries. In reality, the success of a fast food restaurant is contingent upon obtaining taxpayer money, avoiding government restraints, and indoctrinating its target audience from as young as possible. The resulting affordable, good-tasting, nostalgic, and addictive foods make it difficult to be reasonable about food choices, specifically in a fast food industry chiefly built by greedy executives.
Often people buy a book at a bookstore after reading the first few pages to make sure that the book is interesting enough to continue reading at home. That is why Amazon has a “Click to LOOK INSIDE!” button on each book. It is the most important part of a whole book in order to catch potential readers. One would expect that both In-N-Out Burger and Fast Food Nation must have strong hooks at the beginning since they were both New York Times bestsellers. Although they both focus on the fast food industry, there is quite a contrast in the way they are written. In the prologue of In-N-Out Burger, the author Stacy Perman writes not about the hamburgers or the company, but mainly about the phenomena that the burgers caused. On the other hand, in the introduction of Fast Food Nation, the author Eric Schlosser splits it into two different parts, a story about Cheyenne Mountain Base and a quick overview of fast food industry. Throughout the prologue of In-N-Out Burger, Perman successfully gets the attention of the readers by describing the facts in detail, which makes them want to turn the pages for further reading. On the contrary, despite Schlosser’s concise and precise narrative, the introduction of Fast Food Nation does not seem to make the readers want to read more due to his unsuccessful analogy and composition of the chapter. The introduction of In-N-Out Burger definitely draws more attention of the readers than that of Fast Food Nation due to the rhetoric and composition.
The reason that Schlosser wrote Fast Food Nation was to shine a light on what goes behind the scenes in the fast food business. Schlosser establishes his ethos by showing the readers that he shares many common beliefs that other Americans have. The author appeals to ethos, for example, when addressing court rulings for cases that are for those injured on the job; this shows the unfair treatment of workers in the slaughterhouses. "The few who win in court and receive full benefits are hardly set for life... losing an arm is $36,000" (Schlosser 185).
Works Cited Schlosser, Eric. A. Fast Food Nation. N. p. : Harper Perennial, 2001. Print.
Food is an important part of popular culture, and the beliefs, practices, and trends in a culture affect its eating practices. The proportion of money spent on food eaten away from home, as well as the number of restaurants, has been increasing since the second half of the twentieth century. People may dine at formal, sit-down restaurants, at fast-food eateries, at cafes, or they may purchase food from street vendors. There has been an “Americanization” of diets through the growth of fast-food restaurants.
American culture is changing dramatically. In some areas it’s a good thing, but in other areas, like our food culture, it can have negative affects. It is almost as if our eating habits are devolving, from a moral and traditional point of view. The great America, the land of the free and brave. The land of great things and being successful, “living the good life.” These attributes highlight some irony, especially in our food culture. Is the American food culture successful? Does it coincide with “good living”? What about fast and processed foods? These industries are flourishing today, making record sales all over the globe. People keep going back for more, time after time. Why? The answer is interestingly simple. Time, or in other words, efficiency. As people are so caught up in their jobs, schooling, sports, or whatever it may be, the fast/processed food industries are rapidly taking over the American food culture, giving people the choice of hot