Eric Schlosser Lecture

The lecture given by Eric Schlosser was very informative, covering the truth about fast food. Fast food was born in Southern California with the McDonald's brothers. They wanted workers who didn't have to be skilled or trained so that they were easily replaceable. After Ray Crock tried McDonald's he soon became the founder of the McDonald's corporation. His values were based on uniformity, conformity, and cheapness. He opened up McDonald's all over the place, including one right across the street from the McDonald's brothers' original location, putting them completely out of business. His morals went something like this: "If a non-conformist was drowning, Id go over and put a hose in their mouth." This guy's big on conformity. He wanted uniform food bought by big distributors. McDonald's went from 171 local supplies to 4 big companies for their beef distribution.

McDonald's soon became the largest fast food employer for minimum wage jobs. The job description attached to working at McDonald's is low pay, high turnover, no benefits, no training... or as Webster's likes to call it: a "McJob." McDonald's took meat-packing jobs from being a great, high-paying, well-respected job, to a low wage, low benefit job given to illegal immigrants. This had a huge impact on American workers, as well as on livestock.

Schlosser covered the health risks of fast foods, including breast and prostate cancers (which may come from the hormones injected in to animals ("you are what what you eat eats")). Antibiotics are creating superbugs. The feedlots contribute to more water pollution than many big cities combined. Fish have deformed sexual organs because the runoff contains hormones. Meat in our stores come from cloned, patented animals that don't have to be labeled. Obesity rates have increased with the increase of fast food availability. Two-thirds of adults in the U.S. are overweight. A "Big Gulp" at McDonald's contains 50 tsp. of sugar... wow!

So why do we keep eating fast food? False and misguiding advertising! McDonald's is the largest distributor of toys. And why wouldn't your kids want to eat dinner at a place that has the towns biggest jungle gym? McDonald's targets them young... as young as 8 and 9 months old! This is the age where we first begin developing our eating habits.

These fast food monsters get away with all of this, including selling contaminated food, because you don't get sick until a few days later. By then it's impossible to directly link it back to fast food.

Schlosser dubs himself a "conservative" because ultimately he wants a food system that will conserve and preserve the land. Now this sounds more like it...

Cronon vs. Thoreau

Thoreau views nature as a place to get away from society and the destruction human beings bring to the natural world. Cronon even says in The Trouble with Wilderness; or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature, "For many Americans wilderness stands as the last remaning place where civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infected the earth." This is somewhat of the Thoreau view that Cronon describes. However, this is far from how Cronon feels about nature. He pretty much mocks Thoreau's views of the natural world in his writing. Cronon says, "Far from being the one place on eath that stands apart from humanity, it [nature] is quite profoundly a human creation..." Cronon has a point here. The forests that we walk in in most of America (including the forests Thoreau resided in) are a result of human interaction. They are not the original forests that flanked this country. They are a result of clear cutting and replanting. Cronon takes Thoreau's ideas and picks out the superficiality and environmental destruction that is a part of our natural world today. What Thoreau thinks of as a place to get away from human interaction, human interaction (or interference) is in fact all around him. Thoreau and Cronon do however agree on the idea that, "No doubt all creatures that live on its surface are but parasites" (Thoreau). Although Cronon may not think all creatures on earth are simply parasites, Thoreau is making the connection that humans are parasites of the earth.

Hello...

...my name is Natasha. This is my 5th year at Ohio University. I began college studying English in 2006. During my Sophomore year I switched to Wildlife Biology. Shortly after I switched back to English. Last year I decided to add Accounting as a second major. So that puts me at a graduation date of somewhere in 2012 (whew). Needless to say, I love school and I love learning. I commute everyday from my home 3o mins outside of Athens. I have 4 big dogs, 2 being English Bull-Mastiffs, one being a German Shepherd mix, the last being a chocolate lab-mix. I love dogs, reading, growing and gathering my own food, yoga, cooking, summertime, fishing, hiking, the farmer's market, and being productive.