Help picking essay topic

[Argy]

I have to write a 4+ page essay for my social problems class, but I am having trouble choosing a topic. It can be about anything related to social issues. Some examples would be teen pregnancy, unemployment, crime, etc. I think there is a lot of leeway.

I am leaning toward writing about the drug war, but I'm not enthusiastic about it. I want to be more specific than just a general topic... Something not so broad.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

 

[The Big Al]

Climate Change and man's effects on it is a favorite of mine. Though I am a met major.

 

[ImJessieTR]

If you want to write about the drug war, there are some ways to narrow it down:

Racial (or gender/socio-economic, etc) perspectives

The effectiveness of current programs (or the most effective current program)

Foreign drug trade and US relations (including the usual Central/South American drug cartels and the flap over US-Canada prescription deals)

The history of US drug wars

Compare/contrast US with another country

 

[Mozz]

The drug war is a fantastic topic.

A narrow topic, good for a 4 page paper, would be on the impact of federal drug abstinence programs (hint: more kids smoke pot now) and/or the benefits of legalizing pot (tax revenue, cleaner stuff, etc.)

 

[The Dude]

A thorough explanation of why abstinence-only programs in the U.S. have helped increase the number of abortions?
An analysis of how the war on drugs disproportionately affects minority communities?

 

[Argy]

I ended up choosing the evils of fast food as a topic. I just finished reading "Fast Food Nation," so a lot of what that said is still fresh in my mind.

Thanks for the input, though.

 

[Mozz]

Ew.

 

[Argy]

Care to elaborate?

 

[Porygon]

Mozz thinks fast food is gross.

 

[The Big Al]

I agree with Mozz (for once) then. I can't remember the last time I stepped into a McDonalds. I usually eat at Arby's, Subway, or YaYa's which are much better for you (I even did paper comparing them to McDonalds and Burger King for health class).

 

[The_Real_Mr_Sawyer]

Fast Food is bad for you, but I don't think we really should be blaming the fast food. Yes, they do hide a lot of crap in those foods, and they are insanely bad for you, BUT, you do choose to eat there. Sure, the food is "addictive" but you can always go somewhere else, a place healthier. But, its your essay, so good luck.

 

[Argy]

The paper isn't really about the health effects, but rather the unsavory practices employed by McDonald's and its suppliers in an effort to save money.

 

[Mozz]

So you're going to rail on capitalism? I really don't get it. McDonald's is evil because they're going after a lower-income demo than Chipotle or Fatburger?

 

[Argy]

Excerpts from "Fast Food Nation":

While the real value of wages paid to restaurant workers has declined for the past three decades, the earnings of restaurant company executives have risen considerably. According to a 1997 survey in Nation's Restaurant News, the average corporate executive bonus was $131,000, an increase of 20 percent over the previous year. Increasing the federal minimum wage by a dollar would add about two cents to the cost of a fast food hamburger.

In 1997 a jury in Washington State found that Taco Bell has systematically coerced its crew members into working off the clock in order to avoid paying them overtime. The bonuses of Taco Bell restaurant managers were tied to their success at cutting labor costs. The managers had devised a number of creative ways to do so. Workers were forced to wait until things got busy at a restaurant before officially starting their shifts. They were forced to work without pay after their shifts ended. They were forced to clean restaurants on their own time. And they were sometimes compensated with food, not wages. Many of the workers were minors and recent immigrants ... As many as 16,000 current and former employees were owed money by the company. One employee, a high school dropout named Regina Jones, regularly worked seventy to eighty hours a week but was paid for only forty.

Over the last twenty years, the rancher's share of every retail dollar spent on beef has fallen from 63 cents to 46 cents. The four major meatpacking companies now control about 20 percent of the live cattle in the United States through "captive supplies"- cattle that are either maintained in company-owned feedlots or purchased in advance through forward contracts. When cattle prices start to rise, the large meatpackers can flood the market with their own captive supplies, driving prices back down.

Every day in the United States, roughly 200,000 people are sickened by a foodborne disease, 900 are hospitalized, and fourteen die.

...the nation's leading agribusiness firms have resolutely opposed any further regulation of their food safety practices. For years the large meatpacking companies have managed to avoid the sort of liability routinely imposed on the manufacturers of most consumer products. Today the U.S. government can demand the nationwide recall of defective softball bats, sneakers, stuffed animals, and foam-rubber toy cows. But it cannot order a meatpacking company to remove contaminated, potentially lethal ground beef from fast food kitchens and supermarket shelves.

A nationwide study published by the USDA in 1996 found that 7.5 percent of the ground beef samples taken at processing plants were contaminated with Salmonella, 11.7 percent were contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes, 30 percent were contaminated with Staphylococcus aureus, and 53.3 percent were contaminated with Clostridium perfringens. All of these pathogens can make people sick; food poisoning caused by Listeria generally requires hospitalization and proves fatal in about one out of every five cases. In the USDA study 78.6 percent of the ground beef contained microbes that are spread primarily by fecal material. The medical literature on the causes of food poisoning is full of euphemisms and dry scientific terms: coliform levels, aerobic plate counts, sorbitol, MacConkey agar, and so on. Behind them lies a simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill: There is shit in the meat.

E.coli O157:H7 is resistant to acid, salt, and chlorine. It can live in fresh water or seawater. It can live on kitchen countertops for days and in moist environments for weeks. It can withstand freezing. It can survive heat up to 160 degrees Fahrenheit. To be infected by most foodborne pathogens, such as Salmonella, you have to consume a fairly large dose- at least a million organisms. An infection with E.coli O157:H7 can be caused by as few as five organisms. A tiny uncooked particle of hamburger meat can contain enough of the pathogen to kill you.

...current FDA regulations allow dead pigs and dead horses to be rendered into cattle feed, along with dead poultry. The regulations not only allow cattle to be fed dead poultry, they allow poultry to be fed dead cattle ... The waste products from poultry plants, including the sawdust and old newspapers used as litter, are also being fed to cattle. A study published a few years ago in Preventive Medicine notes that in Arkansas alone, about 3 million pounds of chicken manure were fed to cattle in 1994.

At the IBP slaughterhouse in Lexington, Nebraska, the hourly spillage rate at the gut table has run as high as 20 percent, with stomach contents splattering one out of five carcasses.

A modern processing plant can produce 800,000 pounds of hamburger a day, meat that will be shipped throughout the United States. A single animal infected with E.coli O157:H7 can contaminate 32,000 pounds of that ground beef.

From "Fear of a Vegan Planet":

It takes twelve pounds of grain to produce one pound of hamburger. This same twelve pounds of grain could make eight loaves of bread or 24 plates of spaghetti. If the beef for your burger came from the rainforest, roughly 660 pounds of living matter is destroyed. This includes between 20 and 30 different plant species, over 100 insect species, and dozens of reptiles, birds, and mammals. One pound of hamburger requires 2,500 gallons of water to produce, which could instead have been used to grow more than 50 pounds of fruits and vegetables. Fifty percent of all water consumed in the U.S. is used to grow feed and provide drinking water for cattle and other livestock. On a planet where a child starves to death every two seconds, fourteen times as many people could be fed by using the same land currently reserved for livestock grazing.

A 1997 Senate report declared that every day, U.S. livestock produce 10,000 pounds of solid manure for every person.

Since 1945, overall pesticide use has increased by 3,300 percent with 1.5 billion pounds of pesticides applied to American farmland annually. Despite the drastic increase in pesticide use, the USDA has found that prior to the 1950s, the overall annual crop loss due to "pest damage" was 7 percent. Today, it's 13 percent ... Studies have shown that 99 percent of non-vegetarian mothers in the U.S. have significant levels of DDT in their breast milk (For vegetarian mothers, the number is 8 percent.).

"In the U.S. we can buy a hamburger for 79 cents," explains cattle rancher-turned-vegan Howard Lyman. "If the American taxpayer was not involved in subsidizing the beef industry, the same hamburger meat would cost over $12. Meat in America today would cost $48 a pound if it were not for the American taxpayers subsidizing the grain, the irrigation water, the electricity, the grazing on public lands. How many people- even in America -would go and spend that amount of money on meat if it wasn't subsidized? We can't afford roads, or schools, or health care, and yet we are paying $11.21 for every $12 of something that is helping kill one out of every two Americans today."