Amy Dinh
Professor Richard Frank
English 1010
6 March 2013
Rough Draft Rhetorical Analysis
After reading the article Don’t Blame the Eater, I came to the conclusion that the eaters
are less at fault than the fast food industry. But why is it more of the fast food industries fault for
making the eaters unhealthy? Is it not the eaters themselves that choose to eat such food that
causes them to be unhealthy? I may not be able to understand why the eaters are less at fault or
why they choose to do what they do, but analyzing the article will help me get one step closer to
the answer. To answer the questions above, I, as a reader, must dissect the article into pieces and
analyze through ethos, logos, and pathos.
Starting off with ethos, this is what got me to read to the end of the article. What was in
the article that had got me convinced to keep on reading? Before reading the article, I read the
subtext that below on the first page. The credentials that David Zinczenko had and his
appearances and essays that show up in magazines/newspapers, such as; New York Times, USA
Today, Oprah, just to name a few that were listed. How was it that it was the credentials that had
convinced me to keep on reading? The New York Times is a well-known paper in the US, even
though it may not be providing readers what they want some of the time. USA Today, another
newspaper, vies with The Wall Street Journal for the position of having the widest circulation of
any newspaper in the United States, and considering that I read it every now and then. As for
Oprah, the magazine came out after the famous Oprah herself, with her controlling the wheel of
the magazine. How is it that this last magazine mentioned relevant? When Oprah had a show, it
was shown every single day, with her giving advice on certain things, but mostly things that were
emotional. Like USA Today, I watched her show when I had the time, enlightening me on things
I never knew.
Moving on, we have logos. What type of statistics and facts are presented in here? David
starts out by giving the readers a statistic on diabetes in children which was generally caused by
a genetic disorder in the year 1994. With this, he gave us a percentage (i.e. 5 percent) about
childhood cases which were Type 2 diabetes, and then later gave another one that was 30
percent. Another was how much diabetes accounted for, which was $2.6 billion in health care
cost, in 1969, and again, he presents a later date stating that the cost has gone up to $100 billion a
year. Besides the statistics, there is the information about calories. The example that was chosen
was that of a chicken salad. David starts to list the amount of calories in the chicken salad, which
is 150 calories, and starts to put on additional calories from other things that could be put into the
salad, such as the dressing, the almonds, and the noodles. A few other things that were
mentioned was how fast food industries use “shady” advertising schemes and the national
decline in the U.S. population’s health, as is stated above the statistics. The statistics, numbers,
and the use of advertising are nice and all, but these are all checkable facts with the technology
that we have today.
What had hit really hard was David’s story of when he was a child. To have a full effect
with pathos, he had written a paragraph about how he was a 1980’s latchkey kid, with parents
that were split up, with his mother barely making enough to pay the monthly bills. David
continues this sentence by saying that he only had a limited choice between McDonald’s, Taco
Bell, KFC or Pizza Hut for both lunch and dinner. For a boy with a mother who barely had
enough money to pay the bills, these were the only options available to an American kid on
getting an affordable meal. With this type of story, a reader can probably sympathize as to what
the author was experiencing.
How was this article in the sense of effectiveness, persuasiveness or even influential? Out
of the three options, it displays effectiveness through pathos. In order to get the readers hooked,
David has written about his childhood, and gaining possible sympathizers. In doing so, he has
made the argument an indirect one. Since direct argument relies somewhat on logos and ethos, it
is only fair to say that indirect argument is possibly supported by pathos. Because of all the
pathos that was emitted during the first few paragraphs, David has argued his case that eaters are
not the ones to blame, but the fast food industry, therefore making the argument indirect.
Another thing to add is if the premises hold any meaning to this conclusion. Some of the
premises were: fast food is way too cost-effective compared to other foods in the industry, it is
easy to fall into a heavy fast food diet if one has a bad situation financially, and that fast, as
unhealthy as it is, is extremely convenient in financial cases and accessible to nearly everybody,
with locations almost everywhere.