Fast Food Nation the Assessment

Fast Food Nation

The Assessment and Analysis of an Image and Passage from Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation

At first glance it appears to be an almost normal scene. A family is seated together, Dad to one side, Mom on the other, with a toddler in her footie pajamas between them. But the actual content and even the presentation of this photo immediately preceding Chapter Eight in Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation reveal much more difficult and pressing truths. First, it must be noted that the family in the picture is Hispanic. Then, one might take notice of the fact that the man is carefully holding his left hand as high above his heart as he can, and is squeezing onf the fingers on that hand with his right. There is a wide swath of drying blood running down his arm, and his eyes are half closed. It is a family picture, yes -- it is even a picture of an almost typical American family. But it is not your traditional happy picture of two parents with their child, but rather is evidence of the human side of an ongoing national problem, the insidiousness and camouflage of which Schlosser makes clear in the following chapter.

During his visit to one of the nation's largest cattle slaughterhouse and meat processing plants as described in the opening passages of Chapter Eight, Schlosser notes that his first glance around what is known as the fabrication room reveals that "there's nothing unsettling about this part of the plant. You see meat like this all the time in the back of your local supermarket." One of the major problems with the fast food industry as detailed in Schlosser's book is the apparent normalcy of things on the surface, when a slightly more penetrating gaze very quickly reveals problems that might be endemic and therefore standard, but which would never be considered normal. This is the construction Schlosser follows in this chapter.

Schlosser's style and progression in this chapter both builds and strengthens his argument in several ways. The picture plays on typical views of families while also detailing a specific instance of the problems that occur in the slaughterhouse and meat packing world. The passage that follows does the same thing, at first noting that nothing seems especially amiss, but then notes sees the workers, "about half of them women, almost all of them young and Latino," and that a few of the women...are sweating, even though the place is freezing cold." These subtle problems, like the subtlety of the man's odd posture in the photograph at the start of the passage, reveal deeper issues -- like the blood running down the man's arm. His description of the armor that the workers wear and his comment that the knife makes it through, anyway, makes it clear right away where this passage is headed. Yet Schlosser's continued subtlety even after this rather un-subtle opening allows him to make his point even stronger.