Supersize Me Research Paper

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Now a staple of US education, Super Size Me documents the strength of the fast food industry’s place in US culture, as well as the toxic impacts it brings. Side-by-side, Morgan Spurlock’s body falls under a month-long McDonald’s binge as Americans declare their love for ultra processed burgers. The power of advertising is obvious. Children recognize Ronald McDonald before Jesus. A girl can recite the Big Mac TV slogan more accurately than the pledge of allegiance. Food is chemically addictive. The moral of the story is that fast food companies are poisoning Americans. Under capitalism, the market is fast food, the demand comes from these “users” (the real term used by these companies for the consumers), the supply comes from the meat industry, …show more content…

turned into Big MacsTM and Chicken McNuggetsTM). Pachirat, in Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight, unpacks the scale of industrial killings of animals and various ways it stays hidden from society as a whole. The bad smell, manure, and killing of producing meat is abstracted and processed away into an ultra consumable, creating an overwhelming demand for animal slaughter, as can be inferred to any industry where a human demand can be supplied in spite of harm being done to non-human animals (Pachirat). Profiteers of any industry harming “non-human” have learned to use smoke and mirrors to pull consumers’ attention away from victims involved in supplying and creating consumer demand at the best profit margin. The guilt and inconvenience of slaughtering animals is carried on en masse in slaughterhouses, in Pachirat’s case study by a non-unionized body of workers consisting mostly of immigrants from Central America, South America, Southeast Asia, and East Africa (Pachirat). Connecting the McDonald's story to the meat industry, profit margins are best when the dirty work is siloed away from the consumers’ view and subcontracted out to where they can’t see it. The fact that this is carried out purposefully can be demonstrated by the Iowa State House of Representatives passing “A Bill for An Act Relating to Offenses Involving Agricultural Operations and Providing Penalties and Remedies,” prohibiting persons from interfering with animal facilities or documenting what goes on inside without consent of the facility owners (Pachirat). Videos or recordings exposing to consumers the inside of the meat industry is a threat to real profits and therefore is unacceptable. Maintaining the abstraction of real animals’ roles in the process of meat away from the meat itself is important to the GDP of Iowa. Animals must remain

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