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Comaritive topics in the book fast food nation
Critical analysis of fast food nation book
Critical review of fast food nation the book journal
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The aquarium of life is filled with all sorts of wonderful fish, each having its own purpose: clown fish to entertain, gold and neon tetras to illuminate, emperor plescostomas to rule, sharks to bite, bottom feeders to pick up the waste left behind and of course feeder fish, to be eaten. Unlike its expensive companions a feeder fish is only worth about 7.2 cents. It is kept in crowded, disease infested waters, sold at a pathetic price, and is made to sacrifice its body for the "common good." In man's aquarium there are many different terms for feeder fish: indentured servants, fiefs, peons, sweatshop workers, slaves. Societies have been built by these people, have sustained through the sweat of these people, and (in my opinion) might not have existed today, without the opportunity to exploit these people. In his book, Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser points out the abuses withstood by slaughterhouse workers and argues that humans should be treated as humans, and that as humans, they deserve a safe environment to work in. Schlosser is completely right in my opinion. The federal government should protect workers' safety using the only force most major companies seem to understand: money. The working conditions, of slaughterhouse workers, depicted in Schlosser's book were both horrible and immoral. "Every year more than one-quarter of the meatpacking workers in this country [...] suffer an injury or work-related illness that requires medical attention beyond first aid" (172). When a quarter of the workers are being injured every year one can easily assume that it is not the workers that are causing the injuries, but the system itself. Schlosser even states that "One of the leading determinants of the injury rate at a... ... middle of paper ... ...o do is be educated, and vote. Since most American's vote anyway, I don't believe that it's asking for much. If feeder fish are to swim with the sharks then they are going to need some protection to keep them from becoming dinner. The question then becomes: who shall protect them? The sharks are not likely to put restrictions on them selves, so in the end it needs to be the aquarium owner. As Thomas Jefferson once wrote, the American government was founded for the people and by the people in order to protect and serve the people. Therefore the American Government needs to protect its people from unsafe working conditions, and it can do this by using money as a tool against Corporations who choose to put American citizen's health at risk. We as American citizens have a hand in American policies, and we can change what the government values by voting differently.
It is not just the animals who are being treated wrongly. The workers are vulnerable and suffer from injuries on a daily basis. This workforce requires so much protection, such as chainmail outfits to protect themselves from tools. From cuts, sprains, to amputations, “ The injury rate in a slaughterhouse is about three times higher than the rate in a typical American factory.” (238). Many immigrants come to the states, some illegally. Companies give their supervisors bonuses when they have little reported injuries as a reward for a spectacular job. Regardless, these supervisors do not make attempts to make the work environment safer. They threaten the employees with their jobs. They will put injured employees on easier shifts to heal so it will not look suspicious as to why they are in pain. Next to failing to report injuries, women in the slaughterhouses suffer from sexual assault. Male coworkers pressure women into dating and sex. Reported cases include men using animal parts on them in an explicit manner, making work another kind of nightmare. All this corruption and lack of respect for workers is all for a cheap meal people buy when they have the
It is unjust that workers have to cover up their injuries in order to continue with their jobs or else they suffer unemployment or cuts to their wage. I’ve seen people trying work even if they were sick, but the supervisors would always send them home. The attitudes of the female workers in the slaughterhouses should also be considered – using sex to gain security in a workplace is unethical. There should be no need for people to get a more secure job just by doing sexual favors, regardless of whether it is consensual or not. I believe stricter observation of laws must be enforced to reduce the lack of safety and the corruption in the slaughterhouse work environment. There is nothing worse than an unsafe working environment.
In conclusion it is obvious to see that rights and responsibilities were not carried out by the meatpacking industry. They were greed driven business men who “poisoned for profit” as president Roosevelt said. The meatpackers had a right to make their product but did not take the responsibility to do it in a manner that was safe to the consumer. Thanks to people like Upton Sinclair and Theodore Roosevelt, the meat industry today takes the responsibility to make a safe quality product of the public.
To give background on the FDA and USDA for better understanding the USDA is responsible for meat and poultry, while the FDA is responsible for dairy, seafood, and vegetables. The USDA was founded in 1862 to encourage food creation in the United States (Sherrow 15). Dr. Peter Collier was the first person to suggest rules and laws for the safety of our food (Sherrow 15). Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act in 1890. The Act made the USDA inspectors inspect all pig products (Sherrow 15). In 1906 the Comprehensive Meat Inspection Act was passed. The act assigned inspectors from the UDSA to the United States’ 163 slaughter houses. In the slaughter houses the meat needed to be inspected before and after slaughter (Sherrow 15-16). The FDA is also responsible for protecting food from terrorists and anyone who wants to try to harm the public (Wilson). The FDA oversees 167,000 farms in the United States and 421,000 worldwide farms. The FDA only has 1,100 inspectors to inspect those farms (Wilson). The number of inspections done by the FDA went from 4,573 in 2005 to 3,400 in 2006 (Sherrow 34). According to the Center of Science in the Public Interest the FDA has no authority for prev...
Due to the demand many packaging for the fish can find its was back to sea, or when fishermen are out at sea they can leave their garbage. Many nets from the boats and gears can also be found in the water, that fish can later see as food, eat it, and die; this ties back to extinction in fish. There is much pollution and decline stocks in fish because it is very hard to regulate the seas. To fulfill the growing demand for seafood, many companies are forced to fish beyond areas that are supposed to be non-fishing zones. This is because there are hardly any laws or restrictions telling them where they can and cannot fish. Sally Driscoll and Tom Warhol report in, ‘Overfishing’, that itt wasn’t until 1956 where we saw our first regulation, the United Nations organized the first UN Convention of the Law of the Sea or the NCLOS which helped promote rights of all countries by establishing boundaries off shore. Meaning that some seafood fished in certain areas of the ocean cannot be sold in certain countries, and in some areas it is illegal to fish unless you have a permit from that country. Economy also helps make it harder to regulate the seas, in ‘Overfishing’ it is explained that Preisdent Barack Obama brought up Antiquities Act of 1906, that let fishermen expand their fishing areas. The United Nations FAO estimates that 25 percent of all fish trapped in nets are labeled unusable or not licensed for fishing by the
...nificance that influences the everyday lives of most human beings. Commercial fishing contributes to the world economy and feeds millions of people. Feeder creatures not only provide stability for species like sharks, whales and dolphins but they also provide the commercial food fish which maintains sustainable populations.
A Civil Action The movie A Civil Action brings up an interesting idea that many people in the public don't see or hear about very often. The idea that the big corporations often don't take into account the safety of the people that work for them or the people that live around the factories. These big corporations are run entirely by money and the idea of what things will cost and how much money they can possibly make. Too many times money is more important than the lives of human beings and the people that run these places only see in dollars and cents. The moral issues that this dilemma brings up are immense. This has been happening for centuries since the industrial revolution. Workers were subjected too harsh conditions and unsafe factories so that more goods could be produced. They had children as young as seven and eight years old working 15 hour days. In our modern times, toxic waste now plays a big part in the safety of people. The waste that these companies produce and dump under our noses don't seem to bother them in the least. The way microeconomics effects this must be fully explored to realize the way the corporate world thinks and acts. The goal of any corporation is to make the maximum profit that they can providing a good or service to the community while doing it as inexpensively as possible to them. Too many times producing these goods, toxic by-products are also produced.
...hen rules and the enforcement of them in the meatpacking industry and slaughterhouses. However, Schlosser disregards to provide a solution. He simply points the finger and leaves the reader depressed, without means or logic to correct the situation. After reading, we enthusiastically agreed with Schlosser when he pulled on our emotional series. His logic was also substantial in this chapter with his thorough research and extensive truthful support. However, because he does not offer any solution to the problem, it diminished significantly from his argument. Although Schlosser's argument cannot be labeled an attack, in our minds, it certainly became nothing short of an overly emotional, well-jointed rage. Schlosser uses these numbers to show the errors of certain meat packing companies and in turn, how this has caused massive illness and injury to the general public.
To fish or not to fish is a personal choice. The fact that the oceans are being overfished is a growing concern for individuals, organizations, and governments throughout the world. In this paper I want to discuss the effects of overfishing on the restaurant industry, and possible solutions to solve the problem. Fishing is an ongoing source of food for people around the world. In many countries it is a food staple in their everyday diet. In more modern societies eating fish has become a sensual experience, and not just for the wealthy. It hasn't been until population explosions in the last century that the demand for seafood has led to more effective fishing techniques and technologies. Now the demand for popular fish like the salmon, tuna, sea bass, cod and hoki, which is the key fish in McDonalds filet o' fish, is diving wild populations to dangerously low levels. The methods used to catch the amount of fish demanded by the industry do not leave sustainable populations in the wild. In an attempt to preserve the fish population, governments have set limits on the minimum size that may be harvested and how many of each may be taken. Boundaries have been set up saying which areas can be fished and which ones should be left alone. A number of smaller fisheries have gone out of business because of the limits imposed by the government. This leads to even less fish being harvested and brought to market. Therefore the amount and varieties of fish at markets are smaller and can cause shortages for wholesalers and restaurants. Some restaurants will no longer have the variety on their menus that they used to enjoy. If a restaurant thrives on its seafood menu they may be unable to cope with the shortages and will go out of business. In the ...
Many of the methods used in commercial fishing are very destructive to the aquatic systems. Industrial ocean trawlers scrape the bottom of the water, often dragging up the seafloor with them. This destroys the habitat and kills many of the bottom dwelling organisms that are vulnerable to these practices. There is also a large amount of marine animals that are unintentionally caught by the large nets. These animals are considered bycatch, having no value to fishermen and are usually killed. These large fishing vessels also add a significant amount of pollution to the water. Fishing vessels cause oil spills as well as discharging chemical elements and wastes into the water. The thousands of of trawlers that pass through Japanese waters create large quantities of water pollution that can devastate aquatic life by changing the chemical composition of the water and affecting all the organisms that inhabit these
From the start of the Civil War until the 1920's Chicago was home to the countries largest meat packing facilities; Philip Armour, Gustavus Swift, and Nelson Morris. As much as 85 percent of consumer meat in the US came from Chicago's vast packing plants. Behind the companies were around 25,000 employees, making up almost half of the entire US meatpacking work force. Most of the employees were underpaid immigrants who spoke little to no english and made a meager one cent an hour. The highest an employee could aspire to was being a "butcher" who were considered the most skilled workers and made up to fifty cent an hour. Workers slaved away in gruesome, unsafe conditions for ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week. Laboring through the ear deafening shrieks of animals a slaughter, treading over slick blood soaked floors, suffering in unventilated rooms and constantly breathing in the vile, putrid smell of every that was the slaughter house. In 1904 the meatpacker union in Chicago went on strike and demanded better wages and working conditions, but the strike didn't even slow down p...
in reading of the atrocities of the Chicago meat packing plants. Take for example the
Can you imagine going through the pain that animals in slaughterhouses went through? Most people don’t think of that part of it but the real fact is that billions of animals went through a painful life to be killed for food every year. Most people like to keep the thought in there heads that these animals live on beautiful green farms where they are treated great and then have a very peaceful death, and never feel any or little pain. Well that is not the case, these animals are treated very unfairly. The animals in slaughterhouses are given a massive amount of antibiotics, hormones, and drugs to keep them alive in conditions that are so bad they would otherwise kill them.
Introduction Canadian health and safety legislation requires companies and organizations to make a commitment towards occupational health and safety. Maintaining a safe workplace environment has numerous benefits. A safe work environment can boost employee morale, increase productivity, and improve job satisfaction. For companies and organizations, these benefits can lead to less turnover and increased employee retention. They can also reduce absenteeism while improving the culture and image of a company or organization.
“Electrical Safety is not an option — it is absolutely necessary for workers and employers alike”.