Andrew F. Smith once said, “Eating at fast food outlets and other restaurants is simply a manifestation of the commodification of time coupled with the relatively low value many Americans have placed on the food they eat”. In the non-fiction book, “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser, the author had first-hand experiences on the aspects of fast food and conveyed that it has changed agriculture that we today did not have noticed. We eat fast food everyday and it has become an addiction that regards many non-beneficial factors to our health. Imagine the wealthy plains of grass and a farm that raises barn animals and made contributions to our daily consumptions. Have you ever wonder what the meatpacking companies and slaughterhouses had done to the meat that you eat everyday? Do you really believe that the magnificent aroma of your patties and hamburgers are actually from the burger? Wake up! The natural products that derive from farms are being tampered by the greed of America and their tactics are deceiving our perspectives on today’s agricultural industries. The growth of fast food has changed the face of farming and ranching, slaughterhouses and meatpacking, nutrition and health, and even food tastes gradually as time elapsed. 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... ... middle of paper ... ...es of cattle, which resulted in the increase of suicidal reports. Slaughterhouses and meatpacking companies have amplified the amount of cattle slaughtered each hour to fulfill the amount of meat consumed in the United States due to the cause of fast food. The damage that fast food had placed on illegal immigrant workers and sanitary workers that are employed in slaughterhouses are as much as murdering the men and women, minute by minute. The growth of fast food is too fast for our voices to be heard and fast food had implemented too much innovation in agriculture today for us to fix. We can still change the society that we live in today, as long as we withdraw our arrogant and selfish thoughts on fast food and think of ways to improve and recover what the fast food industry had done. Work Cited Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation. New York: Perennial, 2002.
Section 1: Typically, we need a well-balanced meal to give us the energy to do day-to-day tasks and sometimes we aren’t able to get home cooked meals that are healthy and nutritious on a daily basis, due to the reasons of perhaps low income or your mom not being able to have the time to cook. People rely on fast food, because it’s quicker and always very convenient for full-time workers or anyone in general who just want a quick meal. Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation argues that Americans should change their nutritional behaviors. In his book, Schlosser inspects the social and economic penalties of the processes of one specific section of the American food system: the fast food industry. Schlosser details the stages of the fast food production process, like the farms, the slaughterhouse and processing plant, and the fast food franchise itself. Schlosser uses his skill as a journalist to bring together appropriate historical developments and trends, illustrative statistics, and telling stories about the lives of industry participants. Schlosser is troubled by our nation’s fast-food habit and the reasons Schlosser sees fast food as a national plague have more to do with the pure presence of the stuff — the way it has penetrated almost every feature of our culture, altering “not only the American food, but also our landscape, economy, staff, and popular culture. This book is about fast food, the values it represents, and the world it has made," writes Eric Schlosser in the introduction of his book. His argument against fast food is based on the evidence that "the real price never appears on the menu." The "real price," according to Schlosser, varieties from destroying small business, scattering pathogenic germs, abusing wor...
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.
Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser, is a stark and unrelenting look into the fast food industry that has ingrained itself in not only American culture, but in many cultures around the world. There is almost no place on earth that the golden arches has not entered. Aside from Antarctica, there is a McDonalds on every continent, and the number of countries that have fast food restaurants is growing on a daily basis. Schlosser describes in detail what happens behind the scenes, before the hamburger and fries come wrapped in environmentally safe paper and are consumed by millions of people daily.
Fast Food Nation is a book that goes behind the scenes of fast food companies and lets everyone how exactly the food is made. It goes into detail about how the cattle are raised, slaughtered and distributed. It gives people a realization of exactly what they are eating when buying food from fast food restaurants.
Fast Food Nation is a book written to let the people of the world know, “ what lies behind the shiny, happy surface of every fast food transaction” (Schlosser, p. 16). In the book Eric Schlosser spends many chapters talking about where the meat comes from and how it is processed. Schlosser goes through the process of how the cattle are brought to the meat packing industry and how it is turned into the hamburgers that we eat everyday. While talking about the meat packing industry, Schlosser also discusses the poor working conditions. The meat packing plants are unsanitary, low paying, and a dangerous place to work. After reading this book my opinion is that some actions need to be taken in order to change the
The book exposes every aspect of the fast food industry, good and bad. Eric Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation uses these aspects to present all of the problems going on throughout the country. In chapter eight, he exposes the side of the fast food culture that no one ever bears in mind, the employees’ well being. In order to raise awareness, he interviewed workers, went inside a packing plant and viewed the average day of meat packers. The most grotesque descriptions of the fatalities and thoughts from their insensitive employers’ are exhibited.
American society has grown so accustomed to receiving their food right away and in large quantities. Only in the past few decades has factory farming come into existence that has made consuming food a non guilt-free action. What originally was a hamburger with slaughtered cow meat is now slaughtered cow meat that’s filled with harmful chemicals. Not only that, the corn that that cow was fed with is also filled with chemicals to make them grow at a faster rate to get that hamburger on a dinner plate as quickly as possible. Bryan Walsh, a staff writer for Time Magazine specializing in environmental issues discusses in his article “America’s Food Crisis” how our food is not only bad for us but dangerous as well. The word dangerous could apply to many different things though. Our food is dangerous to the consumer, the workers and farmers, the animals and the environment. Walsh gives examples of each of these in his article that leads back to the main point of how dangerous the food we are consuming every day really is. He goes into detail on each of them but focuses his information on the consumer.
In Martinsburg, WV, fast food ruined the landscape, “In 1942 there were about 3 million apple and peach trees in the area, today there are about 300,000,”(p.20 lines:65-67) In addition, most farmers are selling the remaining farmland,”The last remaining farmers are selling their land to real estate developers, and new neighborhoods”(p.20 lines:65-67). Other effects of fast food is landfill problems,“Fast food places use a lot of a lot of packaging. From the wrappers and straws to the boxes and bags, fast food packaging counts for an estimated 40 percent of all litter (including drinks, chips, candy, and other snacks) with Styrofoam being the most common food waste. What’s more, Styrofoam takes an unbelievable 900 years to breakdown in landfill!” These are some of the ways that fast food affects the
Schlosser’s main idea in this text is that America’s economy and society are being negatively affected by fast food. He argues that the convenience and cheapness of these foods has its unpleasantries. In his book, he discusses how not only the people eating the food are having effects on their health, but also the people who work for the industry as well. There is a very high possibility that the people who work in the slaughterhouses can injure themselves with the apparatuses they use. Because of the unsanitary environment they work in and companies ordering them to increase the production rate, many employees have been wounded and in some cases, died, for their profits to be
In the book Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser talks about the working conditions of fast food meat slaughterhouses. In the chapter “The Most Dangerous Job,” one of the workers, who despised his job, gave Schlosser an opportunity to walk through a slaughterhouse. As the author was progressed backwards through the slaughterhouse, he noticed how all the workers were sitting very close to each other with steel protective vests and knives. The workers were mainly young Latina women, who worked swiftly, accurately, while trying not to fall behind. Eric Schlosser explains how working in the slaughterhouses is the most dangerous profession – these poor working conditions and horrible treatment of employees in the plants are beyond comprehension to what we see in modern everyday jobs, a lifestyle most of us take for granted.
“Out of every $1.50 spent on a large order of fries at fast food restaurant, perhaps 2 cents goes to the farmer that grew the potatoes,” (Schlosser 117). Investigative journalist Eric Schlosser brings to light these realities in his bestselling book, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Schlosser, a Princeton and Oxford graduate, is known for his inspective pieces for Atlantic Monthly. While working on article, for Rolling Stone Magazine, about immigrant workers in a strawberry field he acquired his inspiration for the aforementioned book, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, a work examining the country’s fast food industry (Gale).
The domestication of plants and animals resulted in obesity, contributed to global warming, and some critics believe caused the Bubonic Plague. According to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention over 35%, equal to 79 million, Americans are currently overweight or obese (“Adult Obesity Facts” 1). This is due to poor diets. In addition, food is too easily available; according to the US Library of National Health and the National Institutes of Health, “the number of fast-food restaurants in the country now exceeds 280,000” and that “fast-food retail sales in the United States have soared over 900%” from 1975 to 2004 (“Adult Obesity Facts” 1). Not only are fast food restaurants ubiquitous throughout the world, their food contains a large quantity of preservatives and fillers. When an American diet is compared with a Kalahari Bushmen’s diet, Americans look like glutens. Bushmen consume and average of 2,140 calories a day whereas Americans consume 2,231 to 3,300 calories each day. Humans constantly had to scavenge for our food before development of farming, preventing the accumulation of fat, whereas, nowadays, humans do not even have to leave their cars to get a meal. Farming and herding has promoted unhealthy diets, and it has polluted the ground, air and water. Pesticides, used on crops, pollute water that animals drink, poison the land, and even sicken field
Many people all around the world and especially in the United States are paying money to poison their own bodies. Fast food is a major problem in the United States. Many people are attracted to fast food restaurants because of their low prices, but fast food is the cause of many health issues and is the main reason for the growing population of obese individuals in America. Although fast food can be a good option for a quick and cheap meal, fast food is very bad for the human body because it is full of questionable ingredients and can cause obesity, heart disease and raise cholesterol.
In the conclusion I would like to say that Schlosser managed in the reportorial voice to tell the history, economic and day to day dealings, and negative implications of the fast food industry through delivery impressive examples of information. Fast food in United States seems to be truly American and considered to be as harmless as an apple pie. However, through his book Schlosser proved that the industry drive for consolidation and speed has radically changed the American diet, economy and workforce in the destructive way.