Rhetorical Analysis Of What's Wrong With The School Lunches

Ann Cooper’s speech about, “What’s Wrong With The School Lunches?” was recorded on December 2007 at EG 2007 conference in Los Angeles, California. She claims that if we do not change the way we feed our kids, they could be the first generation in US history to die at a younger age than their parents. Ann Cooper audience is the parents, governmental systems, and public-private partnerships, because she does not agree with the way the government commodifies food. Also, she understands the importance parents play in the obesity epidemic.
She is trying to persuade her audience to feed their kids with more healthier foods by spending more money for their school lunches in order to make changes in their eating habits. Most of her speech, she uses

pathos and logos. She also uses ethos, because she has a history with the topic, if given that she is a director of Nutrition Services the Berkeley Unified School District.
In her speech, Ann Cooper argues that we have to change about our kids eating habits and to teach them how to eat healthier. She supports her claims by using the combination of ethos, pathos, and logos.

Ann Cooper demonstrates her topic by using ethos so effectively, because she has lots of background information about her topic. She says that “I am the director of Nutrition Services for the Berkeley Unified School District”. With this statement, she expresses how deep her connection to the topic is. Moreover, she says, “I have 90 employees and 17 locations, 9,600 kids. I am doing 7,100 meals a day, and I have been doing it for two years, trying to change how we feed in America”. These accomplishments and accolades shows the credibility of what she is saying. She also says, “Now I said I’m doing this in Berkeley, and you might think “Oh Berkeley. Of course, you do it in Berkeley””. The reason why she mentioned that statement is to avoid from audience prejudging about her working place. She adds, “Now, in Berkeley, we’ve gone totally fresh. We are cooking from scratch everyday”. She uses that statement to support her argument by implying there is no reason that hold is holding us back; if I did, you can do it too. Lastly, she says, “I work with in Harlem, EATWISE – Enlightened and Aware Teens Who Inspire Smart Eating”. With this statement, she uses ethos in regard to what she has done to change kids eating habits. Overall,, she shows that her experiences are the real facts that make her knowledge credible.

Ann Cooper appeals to bathos for demonstration of her topic.

She starts with what she has seen in recent years. She says, “We, as a nation, have to start thinking about consuming, growing, and feeding our children food that is not chock-full of chemicals. We cannot keep feeding our kids pesticides and herbicides and antibiotics and hormones”. With that statement, she is trying to trigger the audience’s emotion in order to put them in action for the change that we have to make in our eating habits. Furthermore, she touches on an important matter with saying that “Well, CDC has gone further to say that those children who born in the year 2000 could be the first generation in US history to die at a younger age than their parents”. She gives us this important matter in order to push her audience more and more to think about what they are doing. To be more persuasive, she continues to bomb audience’s emotion by mentioning, “We cannot keep serving kids processed crap full of chemicals, and expect these are going to be heatlhy citizens”. Finally, she say, “We as a country, should be ashamed at that. The richest country. In our country, it’s the kids that need it the most, who get this really, really lousy food… And those are the same kids who are going to be getting sick, and we should be taking care of”. She uses these sentences to make the audience feel ashamed and sorry for their kids. To appeal to the audience emotion. Ann Cooper uses these samples of

pathos.

Ann Cooper uses facts and statistics to appeal to logos by giving them as an evidence to her argument.

She says, “There are some of my kids with a salad bar”. Cooper displays a picture of kids that seem to be festive for eating healthy food such as salads, in hopes that the image will persuade the audience to change the children’s eating habits. She continues with one of the main reasons that prevents our kids from doing that by giving statistical data: “We see big businesses, Monsanto and DuPont, who bought out Agent Orange and strain-resistant carpet. They control 90 percent of the commercially produced seed in our country. These are – 10 companies that control much of what’s in our grocery stores, much of what people eat”. She supports her claim by giving statistic facts about what today’s kids eat: “One of my big soapboxes right now is antibiotoics70 percent of all antibiotics consumed in America is consumsed in animal husbandry”. She gives this information to draw attention on animal husbandry, which we all are eating. Then, she goes on the reason that forces us to eat those unhealthy foods: “In less than 200 years, you know, just a few generations, we’ve gone fro being 200 – being 100 percent, 95 percent farmers to less than 2 percent of farmers”. Lastly, she uses the statictorcal studies about how much money des that National School Lunch Program and we spend for our children’s lunch: “The National School Lunch Program spends 8 billion dollars feeding 30 million

children a year… We are spending 110 million dollars a year on fast food. 100 billion dolalrs on diet aids. 50 million dollars on vegetables. 200 billion dollars a year on diet-related illness today”. These statistics and facts help her building a strong argument.

The author was effective because she used all three rhetorical appeals – ethos, pathos, and logos – to support and build a persuasive argument. There was not any big flawas in her logic. The author was trying to convince her audience, parents, governmental systems, and public-private partnership, to change our children’s eating habits and to