Analysis Of Fast Food Nation

The commercials on the television, the advertisements placed on newspapers and the banners by big conglomerates have one thing in common: They are mostly geared towards children. Chapter 2 of the book Fast Food Nation, written by Eric Schlosser provides a history of two big American companies, McDonalds and Disney, and how their selfish desires led to marketing directed towards children. Schlosser’s central idea and usage of argumentative techniques along with bias define this chapter’s purpose as an educational work designed to reveal the antics of big money corporations. The central idea of this chapter is focused solely on the greed and selfishness of big corporations as they try to advance their business and gain profits while being
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Bias is the one reason why Schlosser is even able to write a whole book on this topic. Almost every subsection of the chapter uses a type of bias to falsely persuade the reader. In many quotations, Schlosser uses ellipsis to omit key words that don’t correspond to the central idea. Even on many statistics, like the one previously mentioned about McDonalds for the central idea, Schlosser only gives the reader general information from the whole memo such as “sales are decreasing” and later uses the ellipsis tactic to string together two separate parts to make the reader believe that other companies are doing better than McDonalds, and it needs to take action to increase profit. Further, near the conclusion of the entire chapter, Schlosser mentions peculiar actions by the administrator of District 11, John Bushey. He describes how Bushey takes action to increase Coca-Cola sales in the district by allowing children to drink Coca-Cola and other products in class. Schlosser, in the next paragraph, writes that Bushey quit the job and he works in another school now but fails to acknowledge the reason why he quit, or if it was even related to the aforementioned incident. He uses omission to make the audience think that the two events are correlated. Overall, the author’s non-opinionated stance and large amount of bias suggests to us that the author is exaggerating the entire situation by making a Happy Meal out of a french fry. The fact that the author didn’t include his opinion but rather included it in his biased information and omission shows us that the chapter leaves out a lot of positives of big corporations along with anything that would make the audience question any information in the chapter for its