Fast Food Nation Book Review

The meat packing industry holds many serious safety and health hazards. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that there was an average of 12.6 injuries or illnesses per 100 full time meatpacking employees, twice as high as the average for all U.S. manufacturing jobs. This number is believed to be too low as many workers injuries go unreported due to employee misinformation or intimidation. In novel Fast Food Nation, author Eric Schlosser gives the reader a behind the scenes look at what actually goes on in meatpacking plants in the chapter labeled as “The Most Dangerous Job.” During this experiment Schlosser uncovers the truth about how many injuries truly occur and how unsanitary these plants actually are.

Millions of Americans view “hard and laborious” work as mowing the lawn or going to an office job eight hours a day. Young teenagers regard these duties as “chores”, miserable and tedious tasks; however, most of these people are oblivious to the mistreatment and overworking the meat industry workers experience daily. Since the 20th century, these employees have been exploited and taken advantage of by the large corporations in the food industry. In the novel The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, revelations are made about the evil ways of the meat factories in the early 1900s. Although the working conditions have improved in several ways, today’s industry is not much better, and food investigators Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan expose the realities

The various viewpoints that Schlosser presents are essential to his argument as they illustrate the gaps between achievement and failure in the fast food industry. Schlosser notes that, when a restaurant owner takes his crew to a conference meant to teach techniques to the average workers by upper-class business professionals, “The Little Caesars employees…have never seen anything like this before” (105). The

He is a retired businessman and decided to create this to help the people who are in need of food. This idea came in to play when “He began soliciting discarded products and factory overruns from distributors and made the food bank a national idea” (Washington post, paragraph 5). After he created the organization, it boomed and expanded to different places at a fast rate. The way it works is that the organization receives food from local supermarkets and hotels.

The work was also dangerous with not much supervising by the government. Workers, on the other hand, had little or even no bargaining power to leave the unsafe conditions. Nowadays, When Americans only pay attention when extreme work strike, levels of abuse are the norm hidden in the factories around the globe. Although the condition seems much improved, consumers don’t know the true fact- “Today, American citizens simply cannot know the working conditions of the factories that make the products they buy.

This problem is getting worse and worse by the years and even former president Barrack Obama commented- “Over the last few decades, we’ve locked up more and more nonviolent offenders than ever before. Longer than ever before and that is the real reason our prison population is so high.” The United States has imprisoned more than 25 percent of all the prisoners in the world, even though we only have about 5 percent of the world’s population.

The author uses pathos by shocking the reader with a unfathomable statistic on injuries in the workplace. He went on to state, “A brief description of some cleaning-crew accidents over the past decade says more about the work and the danger than any set of statistics. … Richard Skala was beheaded by a dehiding machine. … was pulled into the cogs of a conveyor belt at an Excel plant in Fort Morgan, Colorado, and torn apart. … fell from the top of a skinning machine while cleaning it with a high-pressure hose, struck his head on the concrete floor and died. …

The Jungle is the story of Jurgis Rudkis and his family. They immigrated from Lithuania to find a better life in America. Their story is a one of tragedy, suffering and poverty. They find their way to Chicago and the meatpacking plants, where they face many hardships and difficulties. Workers at the plants are not paid well, are overworked and face dangerous conditions, but Jurgis has no trouble getting a job there.

Blaire Carney December, 1, 2017 Changing Society DBQ DiPrimo 6 During the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, there was a great abundance of civil issues with American politics and society. Reformers are those people who not only took notice of the problems but also took actions to amend them. Society was such a mess that most citizens were in danger, be it from food unfit to eat before it was further defiled by workers and animals in the abhorrent circumstances found within most food-processing factories, illnesses spread through closely confined living quarters lacking ventilation or necessary access to bathrooms for basic hygiene, corruption, and bribery inherent in the structures of political machines, or discrimination

Fast food is one of the big issues in america. Is a restuarant where all the food is low at price but can harm your health. The ingrediens our food contains from this places can hurt us physically and mentally. So always be aware of what you are purchasing and putting into your body when you go to a fast food

provides several examples of logos, the appeal to logic. Using facts and statistics, such as the decline in FDA inspections from 50,000 in 1974 to only 9.164 in 2006, and how the market is heavily dominated by the top four beef packing companies controlling over 80% of the market today, where the top five companies only controlled approximately 25% of the market in the 1970’s, the documentary provides reliable data to strengthen its logical appeal. Food Inc. is a persuasive documentary that undoubtedly illustrates the corruption within the food industry that has been deliberately hidden from the American consumer. While this documentary does an excellent job of persuading their views and opinions using rhetorical structure with strong representations of ethos, pathos, and logos, it offers few ways to logically overcome the challenges imposed by the food industry. Consumers are urged to purchase locally grown meat and produce though this alone is not an end all to the corruption within the food

Uptown Sinclair’s book The Jungle was originally written to expose the working conditions within the meat packing industry. Sinclair shocked millions as he bore what it was really like behind the scenes. Employees worked with contaminated and rotting meat, which was not a health violation at the time. This eventually led to new food and federal safety laws. Most of the labor force was an immigrant, who moved to the United States with hopes of the “American Dream.”

Coal mining in Cape Breton is an important piece of history, it gave many men, young and old, secure jobs. Jobs that also meant endangering their lives every day as they went into the mines, possibilities of dust explosions threatened them daily along with unknown threats to their health, breathing in the dust from the mines would build up and cause serious long term lung diseases. Taking jobs in the mines meant being put in a company town, leaving them little to none free choice of their own, also taking the job meant being paid very little which resulted in hunger and poverty among the miners, and when striking against the company for more money and more power over their own lives it resulted in extreme police brutality towards the miners.

The article, “Food Waste Is Becoming Serious Economic and Environmental Issue, Report Says,” by Ron Nixon, talks about food waste and of plans on how to stop it. Specifically, Nixon argues that there are millions of people all over the country that don’t have enough to eat. Also that there are people that go to bed hungry most days, while others are throwing away extra scraps they didn’t eat. Nixon writes about the tons of food thrown in the trash every week, resulting in economic and environmental issues. Also about how the Earth’s landfills then get filled up with even more garbage.

The three different camp types in Auschwitz were, labor camp, extermination camp, and concentration camp. Although labor camps focused on labor the most, all three camps forced the Jews to work. The amount of labor that was forced upon the Jews was extremely high, and many Jews died due to the tiresome work. The Jews were needed by the Germans because the war required laborers to make the needed tools and to build new barracks for arriving prisoners. Jews were used by factory owners due to the cheap cost and the amount of workers laborers available.