Eric Schlosser's book The Fast Food Nation

They are in core exploiting the reluctance of voters to approve taxes for schools, leaving school districts to scrounge for funds w here(predicate)ver they can, including accenteting devalued intellectual nourishment to their semi-captive audience of students.

The immobile food industriousness has also shown itself ready to dine on pork at the federal trough, collecting hundreds of millions of dollars in job- didactics funds, sequence doing all they can to minimize the already- minuscule skill requirements, and thus training needed, for its largely minimum-wage workforce

(Schlosser 72-73). Although not mentioned in Schlosser's book, the fast food manufacture has in fact entered the popular culture as the symbol of dead-end work, with such terms as McJobs, and the thaumaturgy that liberal arts graduates exit end up maxim "Do you want fries with that?"

At the same time, however, Schlosser sometimes bends the interpretation of the very facts he exhaustively catalogues. For example, climb up the start of the book we read that "a hamburger and French fries became the quintessential American meal in the 1950s, convey to the promotional efforts of the fast food manacles" (Schlosser 6). Yet not too many pages further on, we learn that while the major(ip) fast-food chains did largely come into being around the 1950s, their process into major corporations took place some years later. McDonald's for example, went from a modest 250 outlets in 1960, most(prenominal)ly in Southern California, to 300

Why do I doubt that Schlosser will end up changing many minds not already sympathetic to his point, let alone alter much mien? I think the main problem is Schlosser's appeal to cold, unverbalised reasonableness rather than enlightened appetite (Russo).

The distortion here may seem trivial, but it has significant implications. Americans' taste for dispose food meals - burgers and fries, tacos, fried chicken, and the like - was not the creation of a sophisticated industry, armed with multibillion-dollar advertising budgets and social scientists conducting studies of how children goad their parents.

The fast-food industry of the 1950s era was not a corporate industry but a small-business industry, made up of hundreds or thousands of various(prenominal) greasy-spoon burger joints. Stand-alone fast food restaurants, or little chains of two or three outlets, are still to be found. Today's corporate giants began in just this way, as Schlosser recounts (18-25).

The basic reason for this, as Schlosser acknowledges, is that the actual food religious serviced has become one of the cheapest components of a fast-food operation. Most of the cost is labor, marketing, and the outlets themselves and their equipment. It costs only a few cents more for a fast food restaurant to serve a 32-ounce soft drink than an 8-ounce one, yet it can be sold for perhaps 50 cents or a dollar more. It is not surprising, then, that the industry has followed the line of least resistance and most profit by emphasizing larger-size items, even if the end pull up stakes is larger-size customers.

Nothing is new about these conditions. They evoke memories of Upton Sinclair's famous discover novel The Jungle, which described awful conditions in the meat packing material industry nearly a century ago. The question is whether the fast food industry has contributed to conditions that long predated it. Gary Alan Fine, writing in agent magazine, argues the opposite:

unappealing jobs because they conclude that their lives will be mark
Ordercustompaper.com is a professional essay writing service at which you can buy essays on any topics and disciplines! All custom essays are written by professional writers!