Summary Of Fast Food Nation

Matt Kozek

8/24/15

Dooley

Fast Food Nation

Fast Food Nation is a book written by Eric Schlosser, the book is divided into two both sections being about entirely different things. The first section is called “The American Way,” which interrogates the beginnings of the Fast Food Nation within the context of post-World War II America. The second section is called “Meat and Potatoes,” and it is about the specific mechanizations of the fast-food industry, including the chemical flavoring of the food, the production of cattle and chickens, the working conditions of beef industry, the dangers of eating meat, and the global context of fast food as an American cultural export. The important part of the book is the second section where Schlosser

Workers get extremely sick in the long term from harsh working conditions and get other career ending injuries from cutting the meat. However, the biggest part of this section is about how the meat produced by slaughterhouses has become exponentially more hazardous since the centralization of the industry-- the way cattle are raised, slaughtered, and processed provides an ideal setting for E coli to spread. Schlosser uses a writing style similar to Upton Sinclair in the Jungle. Schlosser tells stories of how children have died from the poor meat handling. To conclude, the authors argument in this book is that the meat industry is extremely flawed and it needs to be reformed to allow more ranchers, to fix the meat handling to become safer, and to fix the working

Schlosser uses mostly logos and pathos to convince reader. Pathos is used many times in the e-coli part of the book by Schlosser telling the stories of sever e-coli cases. For example, Schlosser tells a tragic story of a child who dies from eating e-coli infected beef at a very young age. Schlosser uses these stories to appeal to the reader's emotions. The other rhetorical strategy that Schlosser uses is logos. Schlosser uses so many facts and statistics to prove his point. Schlosser talks about statistics of infected beef and he also talks about a 35 million pound meat recall. Moreover, Schlosser uses pathos to appeal to the readers emotions by writing about very sad stories and then uses logos to force his point in using heavily backed up