Losing Land Brings Greater Pro
Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser is a book about the increasing growth of the fast food industry in the United States throughout history. This book captures many different aspects about how the growth of this industry is putting a damper on American society. In particular, Schlosser uses Chapter 6 to explore how many ranchers are losing their land due to monopolizing power of the meatpacking industry. In this chapter, Schlosser uses two significant sources to prove how ranchers are losing their land, contributing to the overall argument of Chapter 6, where he successfully vilifies the meatpacking and fast food industries for forcing ranchers to lose their livelihood and loved ones.Schlosser starts Chapter 6 with a story about a man named Hank who is kind enough to show Schlosser around his Colorado Springs ranch. This story ends with Hank showing a section of his ranch where a stock car racing track has been built, an area that was once filled with beautiful landscape, but now the product of a developing America. (Schlosser 135) This story is used to be a gateway to the hard facts that Schlosse
The way that he structures the chapter, giving a story to catch the attention of the reader, then stating hard facts that tie to the story, and then bringing back the story to fully get the point across, is why Schlosser is so successful. Schlosser successfully intertwines the information that he extracts from two resources in order to make his argument more strong while also effectively capturing the attention of the audience. From the research that Schlosser does, both of his sources presented the fact that millions of acres of ranchland have been lost and are being sold for hundreds more than the amount they were originally bought for. These sources also show that it is very hard for the ranchers to protect their land; 90,000 acres a year are being lost. Schlosser uses the story of Hank to appeal to the reader and then uses the hard facts from his research to verify that his research is true. Again, this tragedy stems from the growth of the industry that takes over the land and livelihoods of independent ranchers of America. (Schlosser 321) From these resources, Schlosser says the reasons why the rancher's problems are stemming from the fast food industry are that the fast food industry is continuously expanding, increasing the need for more meat, throwing the small rancher out of the market, giving the meatpacking industry control, causing the small rancher to not make as much money, then the small rancher does not have enough money to keep his ranch protected when the state wants to build on it. Schlosser is successful in using his resources effectively to help make his point of how the lives of ranchers are directly negatively affected by the meatpacking and fast food industry. (Schlosser 145) These loses have a huge impact on the mentality of the ranchers who can't get help. He ends the chapter with the suicide of Hank, implying that it could have been due to the fact that he was losing the battle to the industries and didn't know how to fix it for his family. Without Schlosser's research, the story from Chapter 6 looks as though it is fiction, but by backing it up with information about how the suicide rate of ranchers is three times higher than the national average, the story is believable. Schlosser uses this information and the story of Hank from the beginning of Chapter 6 to tie into the end of this chapter to make the greatest impact. Schlosser then uses his research in "The Threat of Wealthy Neighbors" section of Chapter 6 to show how Colorado's ordinary ranchers have lost over a million acres of land, this problem stemming from the fast food industry. (Schlosser 144) He uses, "A Report on the Conversion of Agricultural Land in Colorado" from the Colorado Department of Agriculture and the Governor's Task Force on Agricultural Lands and also, "Loss of Agricultural Land Figures for Colorado" a memorandum by David Carlson, books rich with information about the difficulties that ranchers are having. r brings about in the sections to come.
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