Introduction
Writing is a very sensitive presentation of facts, ideas, or opinions as the author is challenged to provide not only a clear picture of an issue, event, or occurrences but also give a deeper meaning to what is visible. Many and different writers use various techniques that either appeal to their readers or impress a message with a stronger impact, such as the production of opinion or even mass action.
Failure of one writer to provide an impact to his or her reader spells not only wastage of print and editorial materials but also effort. Further damage includes readers’ frustrations and disappointments.
This essay shall try to evaluate Eric Schlosser’s technique in the book Food Nation using the excerpt “Behind the Counter”. It will try to present how the author did a good or a bad job in providing a view on the opportunist nature of fast-food chains.
Discussion
At an initial view, the author began this chapter by providing a bird’s eye view of the people and their engagements with their work. It delivers the present phenomenon on fast food chains that have taken over the majority of the global foodservice industry and how these impress customers and outsiders of the clean, efficient, healthy, and ideal place to dine and add a little of social life. With vast capital on building, machinery, and impressively designed interiors and furniture, customers and the public are easily swayed and encouraged to patronize such.
A closer look done by investigative writer Schlosser, the public — with or without close encounters with the people, the system, and everything about fast-food chains — are immersed in a different world of abuse, opportunism, as well as feeding the consumer with thrash.
The excerpt opens with one crew member named Elisa waking up to start her day as a crew member. It uses a descriptive narrative as it was an essay about one ordinary day of a person. It is, as it describes how Elisa gets to her work from her quaint and silent-at-dawn neighborhood in suburban America. It just happens that the person at hand was a crew member at a Macdonald’s Colorado Springs branch.
The narrative went on to describe how many few workers — from a manager to a general all-around couple who maintains legwork of preparation, cleaning, and maintenance —maintain the fast-food chain without special skills needed but trained to follow orders by the book to assemble food, clean counters, create milkshakes, etcetera. “They turn the ovens and grills […] get the paper cups, wrappers, cardboard containers, and packets of condiments […] frozen hash browns, the frozen pancakes, and the frozen cinnamon rolls…” (Schlosser, 2001, p 788).
The chapter also provided an exposition on how the fast-food system developed using “throughput” using system and machinery to allow few workers to deliver a massive output. The system was credited to Fred Turner, a Macdonald’s executive in the 1950s. “Turner put together an operation and training manual for the company that was seventy-five pages long, specifying how almost everything should be done. […] Known within the company as “the Bible”… (Schlosser, 2001, pp 789-790).
His description and narrative provided the robot-like structure within the premises of the fast-food chain’s operations, how fast food companies cast an enormous amount of power over their employees as each becomes dispensable and may be replaced at any time the employee no longer wants the job, or when the employer finds the employee no longer of any advantage for the company. Sociologist Robin Leidner was quoted in the book noting, “When management determines exactly how every task is to be done … and can impose its own rules about pace, output, quality, and technique, [it] makes workers increasingly interchangeable,” (qt. from Schlosser, 2001, p 790.)
Other opportunist examples cited by Schlosser include the hiring of unskilled workers comprising mostly of teenagers, paid at a minimum level as contractual workers with limited working benefits. “As the number of baby-boom teenagers declined, the fast-food chains began to hire other marginalized workers: recent immigrants, the elderly, and the handicapped… Many know only the names of the items on the menu; they speak “McDonald’s English,” (p 790). The fast-food chains employ the most disadvantaged members of the American society and provide only training on basic job skills such as getting to work on time.
However, the book provided a very fleeting view of individual franchisees who are also concerned about the welfare of their workers. It showed how the fast-food giants remain unbent on their convictions to churn out the most from their established systems of operations further developing a helpless scenario to cast a negative shadow on the giants.
Using narrative, descriptive, and even historical or chronological presentation of facts and ideas (Rainer, 2004), Schlosser effectively provided a clear picture of the evils of fast-food chains. As presented clearly, the many advantageous positions of fast-food giants against their workers provide a tilting balance with one end standing way up and the other end exactly on the opposite.
Conclusion
The writer presented not only a clear but in-depth view of the fast-food system. Consequently, Schlosser has a very convincing essay about the negative forces being practiced by these multinational giants that take on the lowest and most marginalized members of society, dress them up a few fast-food chain uniforms to have their small place in the economic system.
It is then conclusive that the public needs investigative writers like Schlosser to open windows on popularly accepted norms and practices so that the stakeholders from consumers to workers may be provided a safety net against abuse and gross neglect. In this way, a fair playing field will continue as well as freedom of expression, choice, and individuality are maintained and championed.
Reference
Rainer, Tristine (2004). ‘The New Diary: How to Use a Journal for Self-Guidance and Expanded Creativity. Tarcher.
Schlosser, Eric (2001). “Behind the Counter” from the book Food Nation. Houghton Mifflin.