Critique Of Fast Food Nation

In Fast Food Nation, the author, Eric Schlosser, creates an argument against the fast food business, how it affects people’s health or lives, its practices, and specifically exploiting how these businesses, blinded by income, overlook important issues. He details the business from its very beginnings, its evolution, and with an expansive afterword, describes what the business is like years after his book was published. Throughout his detailed descriptions and background, Schlosser uses several kinds of arguments to get his point across. Schlosser backs up all his ideas with convincing evidence, and proposes possible outcomes in the future with existing evidence. Schlosser gets to the reader using these techniques and creates a proposal argument …show more content…
This ethical appeal carries his argument in a positive light, and never leaves you in the dark, which further strengthens it. When he expresses concern of the way companies target children in their marketing, a reader will understand and be on his side. With in depth insight of the companies wanting loyal-for-a-lifetime customers and including phrases used by companies like “cradle-to-grave”, Schlosser manages to build distrust to fast food businesses in the reader. He further strengthens the distrust when he includes other unsuccessful marketing campaigns that were aimed at children, either by using a cartoony mascot, or being direct on it being a product for kids. By detailing ads for cigarettes, that used a cartoony mascot called Joe Camel, and including details like “nearly all of America’s six-year-olds could identify Joe Camel, who was just as familiar to them as Mickey Mouse” he manages to stain any practice of marketing for kids in the reader’s mind. Along with cigarette ads being popular among kids, he also mentions a Budweiser beer ad being kids favorite television ad. These ads are aimed at what these companies called the “pester power”, meaning they were designed so that kids could nag their parents to buy them whatever the ad was for, and possibly bring in extra purchases from the parents themselves. Schlosser paints a picture of these companies trying to manipulate children 's’ behavior that doesn’t sit well in the reader’s mind in the way it is told to them, which is intended by Schlosser. By bringing up an argument of definition in a reader, where they ask “Is marketing to children a bad practice?”, Schlosser succeeds in his goal to show the bad parts of companies marketing