“Where’s the Beef?” is a popular slogan that is used by the fast food chain, Wendy’s.  The fast food industry uses propaganda to make people want to eat their food.  When consumers see the said ad, poster, or commercial, by human nature they think that it looks appetizing and they want to eat it.  For example, the Wendy’s Baconator consists of a double cheeseburger with six slices of bacon and a mayonnaise and ketchup mixed sauce.  In their ad for a Baconator, it shows two thick cut, quarter pound, juicy looking, 100 percent beef patties covered in perfectly melted cheddar cheese. Accompanied by six thick cut Applewood smoked bacon strips and drizzled on top is the pink mayonnaise based sauce.  To top it all off is a premium toasted bun to hold the said “art project” together.  But in reality, what is presented when a Baconator is ordered is two sponge looking patties with an unmelted slice of cheese on each.  Also, the bacon is very undercooked, the sauce is vomit colored, and the bun is soggy.  Digressing from Wendy’s propaganda, Wendell Berry in “The Pleasures of Eating” teaches consumers not to make snap judgements about eating and think of how that food got there.  Another objective of his is to make the reader think before they buy “will my burger really look like that?”  By looking at paragraphs two and three on page 3, we can see that Berry paints such vivid, horrid images in the reader’s mind about how food is manipulated beyond point where it no longer resembles any part of the animal that it once came from. He also uses strong imagery to present the living conditions of an animal before it is slaughtered and butchered to be fed to the common public, which is not obvious to most people.  This is important because in order for the readers to be smarter about their eating habits, they must first be educated on how the food is made or where it comes from.

There is a plethora of various makeups across the world to make humans look more appealing to the eye.  But who would have ever thought to put makeup on food?  The imagery used in paragraph two on page 3 illustrates a picture in the mind of a consumer of an actor wearing makeup.  Berry says “One will find the obliviousness represented in virgin purity in the advertisements of the food industry, in which the food wears as much makeup as the actors” (3).  What Berry means by this is that not only do actors wear a great amount of makeup, but the simile he uses compares food to actors, a strange comparison.  It is strange, but it catches the attention of the reader because who would think that food wears more makeup than movie stars.  Also, in making this claim, he really makes the reader think about if they have eaten the theoretical makeup on their food.  In the same paragraph, Berry paints another vivid image in the mind of the reader.  Berry says “The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared or fast food, confronts a platter with inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived” (3).  Berry’s word choice here really makes the reader think about what processes that food had to go through for them to consume it.  Also, the world choice in this saying is one that is very horrifying.  What Berry is trying to do here is that not all food is made with tender love and care like how Grandma makes it.  These words are very gruesome and very industrial-like and not very appetizing.  Berry is not only trying to educate the consumers on where their food came from, but also to inform them that not all food is natural.

Imagine being stuffed in a room with 25 other people and the space of the room is only supposed to hold about ten.  Cows are often placed in areas that are overcrowded and that is simply because the farmers have brought in too many and they do not care for the living conditions of the animal, only their meat.  The imagery he uses in the next paragraph on page three is very heart wrenching. Berry does a great job in this paragraph to grab the reader’s attention.  Berry says “It would not do for the consumer to know that the hamburger she is eating came from a steer who spent much of his life standing deep in its own excrement in a feed, helping to pollute the local streams” (3).  His main tactic here is when someone reads this, they stop and think for a second and say “Wow I never thought of it like that.”  Which is his whole idea of the entire piece.  Another sad thought in this paragraph is when Berry points out that “the calf that yielded the veal cutlet on her plate spent its life in a box in which it did not have room to turn around” (3).  A calf is a baby cow, so naturally anything that happens to a younger version of anything, it is automatically sadder than it would be for an adult.  At this point, Berry wants the reader to envision themselves stuffed in that box, not able to turn around.  There are some commercials on television today that show chickens living a happy life and being fed with proper antioxidants and vitamins.  Sometimes, it is not all glitz and glamour like in those chicken commercials.

In this article, Berry tries to inform the uneducated consumers of the world on where their food comes from.  His strong usage of imagery in the second and third paragraphs of page three really hit home.  He speaks about the food industry making consumers oblivious to the fact of how their food is basically manufactured to look appetizing rather than naturally appetizing.  He also touches on the cruel and hostile environments that the animals have to go through before being slaughtered for their meat.  Such as, being raised in a pile of their own waste, and being stuffed in a box with not even enough room to simply turn around.  These animals are deprived of the basic life necessities in walking room and even food.  Berry even says that animals have to live only on antioxidants and other drugs.  People might say “well that’s their purpose in life, to be eaten.”  Sure, that is true to some extent and that process is called farming, but depriving an animal of its ability to walk and starving it to near death is not called farming, it is just cruel.  People often overlook the consequences to eating pre-cooked, processed, or even fast food.  Not only are they very unhealthy and unnatural, but they are aiding in this cruel process where animals are abused, deprived, starved and then slaughtered.  These food industries have no care for the beautiful animals that provide the population with great amounts of food for us to survive.  Next time when considering fast food for dinner, do no ask “Where’s the beef?” and simply take a second and ask “Where’s the beef coming from?”
