Eating Animals By Eric Schlosser Essay

Fast Food Nation Rhetorical Analysis Eric Schlosser, renowned author and journalist, of the book Fast Food Nation argues conditions in slaughterhouses across the country put workers at risk for injury. Schlosser tours the meat facility and documents his findings to receive first-hand accounts from the workers. He focuses on raising awareness for the workers, who endure egregious conditions, in order to reveal the unethical actions of the company owners. He strives to reach lawmakers who have the ability, under their control, to enact changes to improve the work life for meat plant employees. Schlosser begins by describing certain common injuries among workers to evoke concern.

Factory farms having locked doors only reinforces what some of us already suspect. That they are engaging in activities appalling to the public. Their secrecy is seemingly sustaining their business. Consumers’ ignorance of the meat production business only encourages inhumane animal husbandry. Foer says, “the power brokers of factory farming know that their business model depends on consumers not being able to see (or hear about) what they do.” (pg. 87) This is why we need to educate ourselves on this matter extensively and start actively demanding where our meat is coming from. Advocating for animal welfare is one way we can begin the process of changing or ultimately ending factory farming.

Journalist and author, Eric Schlosser, in his book, “The Most Dangerous Job”, addresses the dangers of working in a slaughterhouse. Schlosser’s purpose is to bring awareness and make a change in the slaughterhouse workforce. He examines the working conditions, regulations, safety, and corporate practices contributing to the high rate of injuries and fatalities among meatpacking employees. He creates a serious tone of information about the fast food industry. Schlosser first discusses the realities of a slaughterhouse by recalling his experience and what he saw during his time there.

For centuries, man has relied on animals for clothing, food, and transportation. However, the recent increase in technological advancements has been accompanied by a rise of animal consumption. Currently, the average person consumes an exceptional amount of meat each year. In order to compensate for this, an overwhelming amount of changes has enveloped the meat industry. Animals aren’t raised, they are manufactured. Eric Schlosser, the author of “Fast Food Nation” uses imagery, understatements, and short sentences when describing his visit to a meat packing plant to develop his argument against the inhumaneness of the meat industry.

Before the passage of the Federal Meat Inspection Act, meat processing plants and slaughterhouses were very unsanitary and dangerous places to work. There had been previous meat inspection acts, such as the Meat Inspection Act of 1890, but they were largely ineffective as they did not successfully regulate the industry (Rouse). Therefore, even if a person

“Eating Animals” is written by Jonathan Safran Foer. This book was published on November 2, 2009. Jonathan Safran Foer is an American writer who is known for his novel, “Everything Is Illuminated”. In this book, Jonathan believes that those who eat meat are involved in the most horrifying crimes committed against animals. Foer Cleary admires his grandmother, who believes that you can never have too much food. Throughout the book, Foer also describes his grandmother’s favorite dish, chicken with carrots, even though he is a vegetarian. Foer cannot eat something that seems to cause him some distress. Throughout the book, Foer presents the conflict between cultural traditions involving meat traditions he wishes to share and his views as a vegetarian himself. Anyone who is a meat eater or even an animal lover, this is a must read book. This book is written with clarity, force and passion that will lead anyone to think carefully about eating animals and where it comes from.

Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Eating Animals” was extraordinary. As a former meat buyer for a large food distributor, I had visited kill floors several times, and I had made some assumptions about the book before I read it. But the meat business has changed radically since I was a buyer and I found the first-hand accounts of extreme animal abuse Safran Foer employed in the book not only to be controversial but also repulsive. It was very difficult to read about some of the regularly used techniques that factory farms use in the name of efficiency.

Do animals have the right to a certain quality of life? How would your views change if our cooks got treated the same way cattle and poultry do? How would you feel about them being beaten and brought to their knees just to be detained to know how to cook todays specials? You might think that the food industry has no issues and no faults behind their tasty food, but when you open up the meat curtain, there is a different kind of world out there that is cruel and inhumane. In Robert Kenner’s 2008 film, Food, Inc., He shows the conditions that cows, chickens, and pigs have to live in. The dark and closeted homes in which the animals are closely compacted together and eating, sleeping, and walking in their own manure. As a person who would consider themselves an animal rights activist, most people would agree that the food industry treats their animals like products instead of living things.

There is a large problem of animal cruelty linked to the food industry in the United States. Countless slaughterhouses, chicken farms, and other meat producers have been found guilty of harming animals and killing them inhumanely. This is something that clearly needs to change.

Schlosser describes the environment of the meat packing plants serving fast food companies in a startling straightforward narrative of his visit through a meat packing plant. He describes a brutal, and sometimes unsanitary environment. The rights of animals are a very broad and complex subject, but Schlosser touches on this as he describes the slaughterhouse floor. He describes animals in various states of disembowelment. Sometimes the animals were dead or stunned; sometimes they were thrashing about wildly in the last throws of death. The slaughter room floor was described as being covered with blood and feces. Employees worked at a furious pace to meet the day's quota. What bothered me most was the fact that this meat is not only prepared for fast food companies but also contracted out to serve our children's schools.

People today believe that the government is supposed to eliminate any possible danger from the food they consume, but that is not the case. In the book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of The All-American Meal written by Eric Schlosser, he discusses numerous problems with food production. Some of these issues are discussed in the “Epilogue”, “What’s In Meat”, and “Most Dangerous Job” chapters where Schlosser elaborates on the government’s role and how workers are mistreated. In the article, “U.S. Meatpacking Under Fire: Human Rights Group Calls for Line Speed Reduction, ERGO Standards,” it explains how the working conditions in the meat packaging industry are hazardous and are violations of basic human rights. Although workers are affected by the government’s role in the food industry, consumers are affected as well. The consequences of the lack of governmental oversight, like food contamination and others, are discussed in the film Food Inc. “Escaping the Regulatory Net: Why Regulatory Reform Can Fail Consumers”, an academic journal written by Henry Rothstein, explains how “putting consumers first” is difficult for the Food Standards Agency (FSA) to accomplish because with consumer’s interests that means regulatory reforms are most likely going to fail.

Close your eyes and step into the world of an individual. You are born into a world where nights and days are never constant (attention getter). You are fed three to five times a day, but no one is there to nurture you. Not even the numerous others crammed into your living space. You grow frantic, scared, and sickly. Now open your eyes, to reality. What I have just described is one of America’s worst ghettos. You know this individual who is trapped in this environment. He is your breakfast, lunch and dinner. It is the meat you eat . Today’s farms not only abuse their animals they also produce harmful diseases and environmental hazards that affect each and every one of us, regardless of whether you consume animal products or not. The U.S. government should ban factory farms and require the meat industry to raise animals in their natural environments (preview of points and statement of purpose).

In addition to his solutions, Pollan’s modern narrative sheds light on the façade of our food industries; asking us to rethink what we know. Despite the mention of certain inhumane acts in All Animals are Equal, Pollan takes us one step further to uncover the reason for which we continue to purchase our corrupt food. We all know animal abuse exists, but the average consumer like myself is more worried about the best price and the fastest way to get a burger rather than how fairly the animals are treated in the process. Whether it be the confined living space of chickens or the mental and physical torture of pigs, we continue to blind ourselves from reality. Is it purely out of selfishness? Or are we too ignorant to come to terms with our wrong doings? Like Pollan explains, it takes seeing the abuse before the shame of our disrespect can be felt (pg.6). After seeing Pollan’s truth, I might now think twice before eating out and the choice to support organic produce can make a dramatic difference for those farmers who promote the ethical lifestyle.

Mahatma Gandhi, an Indian spiritual leader once said, “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated” (n.d.). Every year, there are animals being killed in the meat industry; more than 25 billion of them. They are being murdered mercilessly in ways that would make any compassionate person cringe. A typical meat-eating American is yearly responsible for the deaths and abuse of approximately 90 animals (HappyCow, n.d.). Animals that are being killed for the intake of humans should be treated fairly and with respect.

“For most humans, especially for those in modern urban and suburban communities, the most direct form or contact with non-human animals is at meal time: we eat them. This simple fact is the key to what each one of us can do about changing these attitudes. The use and abuse of animals raised for food far exceeds, in sheer numbers of animals affected, any other kind of mistreatment” (Coats). The most effective method to stop this cruelty is to learn about where the meat comes from, by supporting the organic and family farms which will ultimately lead to the reducing the amount of animals that have to suffer (PETA). More than 95 percent of animal abuse in America occurs in the meat packing industry (Harper & Low). Animals suffer an unimaginable amount, they are raised to be killed, then bought and then consumed. In order to help fight back against the abuse, there needs to be a cut back on the amount of meat or poultry that is consumed. Seriously consider the option of becoming a vegetarian; by not eating meat, you completely stop supporting animal