Glenn Reading

Glenn Reading

Pre-Reading:

1.       I looked at an advertisement for “Chick Fil A” and it does have an animated animal. One of the main slogans they use is showing a cow holding a sign and it states “Eat More Chicken”. This is an individual thought but to me it just grosses me out. I am a vegetarian so the fact that they use this kind of advertisement making it a comedy is repulsive. Eating chicken is no better than eating a cow. It doesn’t mean I hate the company, there advertisements just do not appeal to me.  

2.       I have never grown up on a farm and vary rarely visited one so I do not have much of a connection to farm animals. That being said though, I am a huge animal lover so I love every kind of animal that is out there. I was always an outdoor kind of girl and I was in 4-H so I have had some exposure to farm animals but it was mostly horses. I’ve never really been close to a cow or a pig. Just seen them at the county fair or from a distance. I do not have much knowledge of the farm culture.

Questions for Journaling and Discussion:

1.       The main characteristics of “factory farm discourse” are the way that farm institutions create certain rules or truths that in turn becomes reality in our society. They use “doublespeak” to mislead people by being funny or avoiding certain subjects. We begin to think of things in a different way due to advertisements and “doublespeak” from the factory farm discourse and how they want to shape us to perceive animals. They make us unintentionally ignore or even endorse poor industry practices even if they are possibly very dangerous. They tend to get us to turn a blind eye but again, unintentionally. I think this type of discourse is completely unethical but it is such a wide used method that it would be so hard to fully go against it because it is all we have known. Nobody else see’s the other side of the factory farm discourse. Nobody realizes that behind the glitz and glamour there could be serious problems. This type of advertisement is misleading and full of so many bluffs and lies.

Appling and Exploring Ideas:

2.       As soon as I read this question I knew exactly what company I was going to choose, Chipotle. One of their main slogans on their website is this: “Food with integrity is our commitment to finding the very best ingredients raised with respect for the animals, the environment and the farmers.” They are not a factory farm and I know this because it says this exactly in their website. It has a page for each one of the animals it uses, pigs, cows and chickens. It tells how they are raised and specifically says that they are not raised on “factory farms” but farms that use “ranching naturally raised” methods. This way very easy to find.

4) I think one important name that comes into my head when I think of this question is Nike. Everybody knows that Nike uses sweatshops. You read every day in the paper about the harmful and deadly use of sweatshops overseas.  We read about how young foreign girls are forced to work in deadly conditions and kill themselves because they would rather die than work in the factories. All of this information is been continually thrown at our faces but does it stop the sales at Nike? No. We find a way to make living beings into non-human commodities. We are not there to feel the direct affect so it is not our problem. That seems to be the outlook of many Americans today and if I was wrong about that then they would no longer exist.