Rhetorical analysis on Think Globally, Eat Locally

            My rhetorical analysis will be on “Think Globally, Eat Locally” by Jennifer Wilkins and Anna Lappe. In the article, Wilkins and Lappe rely heavily on comparative imagery in order, it seems, to try to make their audience, the American public, feel guilty about how our eating habits affect the global climate. They discuss how we waste large amounts of resources, such as food and land, in order to produce and distribute various parts of our diet that we don’t actually need. Wilkins’ and Lappe’s use of extreme comparisons, such as between shipping fresh tomatoes to New Jersey with driving an 18-wheeler to the moon over a dozen times, work to create a sense of guilt in anyone who has at least considered the fact that burning fossil fuels negatively affects Earth’s climate. If they don’t feel that, I’m sure they at least feel the pain in their wallet after realizing how much that would cost.

One assumption that Wilkins and Lappe seem to make, based on how varied the topics they discuss are, is that Americans are very diverse in what our eating habits are. By discussing such ideas as eating locally and seasonally, they manage to connect with people who, although they have access to locally grown food, tend to buy food that has instead traveled perhaps a few thousand miles just to get to them. Of course, if this were the only route the writers went in showing how we can improve, then they would be isolating those Americans who live in places where food either isn’t or can’t be grown locally to any real extent, such as Alaska. However, they (Wilkins and Lappe) manage to address all their readers by continuing with other topics that do apply to the different areas. Some example of what they talk about that can be applied to nearly all Americans are our junk food and soda habits, as well as our habit to eat more than necessary. By branching out into so many parts of how we eat, they manage to keep each reader focused on looking for ways in which they can change, even though they might exclude themselves from one or two of the given topics.

To conclude, Wilkins and Lappe successfully manage to connect with an impressively wide range of American readers by accounting for so many different eating styles and habits, and having connected with their readers, they proceed to pull hard at their hearts with strong imagery of the waste we go through just to keep those habits. They don’t leave much room for people to excuse themselves from finding at least one way they can eat cleaner.