Fast Food Nation Literary Elements

Non-fiction

The events described take place in the cities around Colorado’s Front Range and the author presents events that took place as far as the beginning of the 20th century. Schlosser analyzes in his book the almost 100-year history of the fast-food industry while also analyzing the way agriculture was affected.

The point of view used here is a third person objective point of view.

Neutral, regretful, remorseful

The protagonists can be considered as being the small farmers who try to take care of the land while working for a living and the antagonists are the big companies who destroy the environment and change the way people should eat and life only for the sake of profit.

The major conflict is between the big businesses and the small ones struggling to survive.

The book reaches its climax when Schlosser exits a slaughter house and realizes just how much the food industry changed in the last 50 years.

The technologies described in the first chapter as being used in the fields foreshadow the way technological developments will influence and affect other industries as well such as the meat packing industry.

When Schlosser says that the meat packing industries no longer offer the same working conditions they used to is an understatement because not only does he prove that the wages paid are so low that the people can barely afford the basic necessities but he also described the environment in which the people are forced to work and they dangers they have to suffer. Schlosser hints that the only people who take these types of jobs are those who are unable to find something else that is paid better or because they are illegal immigrants and thus they can’t be legally hired by other employers.

While Schlosser blames the food industry for changing the way the Americans eat, he argues that in some cases, when people get infected with bacteria form food, the ones to blame are not the one who raised and slaughtered the cattle but rather those who undercooked the food. Many employees, to ensure that they sell as much as possible, do not make sure that the meat they serve is properly cooked and so the risk of selling contaminated food rises. Thus, Schlosser does not blame the people who sell the meat as much as he blames the ones buying it.

Schlosser creates a gruesome image when he describes the conditions inside a big slaughterhouse. The workers inside the plant work closely together and are pushed to the brick of collapsing by being asked to slaughter and prepare as much meat as possible and they often have to work in the blood left from the cattle. The image created here is that of a machine working to produce as much as possible and not of actual human beings with souls and personalities of their own.

When Schlosser talks about the fast-food industry, he seems to have a love-hate relationship with it. On one hand, he blames the industry for changing for the worst the way the American society sees food in general but on the other hand he understands the pull fast-food can have on people. In this sense, his stand is somehow paradoxical and uncertain because he neither condemns the industry nor does he hails it as being something positive.

Schlosser compares the way Walt Disney made his cartons with the way Kroc envisions burger-making. Just like Walt Disney divided the work load into much smaller, easily to deal with parts, Kroc divided the process of burger-making into much smaller, easily to manage parts that ultimately made his employers work more efficiently. The parallel drawn between them has the purpose of stressing the idea that the process of dividing the workload into much smaller parts was something adopted all over the country in different types of industries and it ultimately changed the image of the working process as well.

When the author mentions burgers and fries, he usually uses the terms in a metonymical sense to make reference to the fast-food industry in general.

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