Catherine Wetmore
RHE 309K #44610 Zacks
October 15, 2013
At every turn on a city block lays some sort of food opportunity – high-end restaurants, local mom and pop shops, grocery stores for home cooking, food trucks, and more. Yet middle to upper class America, as Tracie McMillan claims in her article, “The American Way of Eating – Who eats at Applebee’s – and why?” continually flocks to Applebee’s, even with cheaper or better options available. McMillan uses this article, adapted from her book, The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table, to persuade readers that people eat at Applebee’s to fulfill their desire for the twentieth century American Dream. McMillan establishes her ethos as an Applebee’s worker with knowledge of the dishes and customers, attempts to appeal to the reader’s logos by rationalizing her claim by tracing the historical context of middle class dining, and matches the witty editorial tone of the website hosting the article, in order to most effectively communicate her claim to her audience.
Effective persuasion relies on a receptive audience, as an argument’s success depends partially on how content, tone, and language align with the audience. Slate.com hosts McMillan’s excerpt, a website which describes itself as a general-interest daily online magazine offering analysis and commentary on current events with a strong editorial voice and witty tone. With other featured articles on the website including “Our Weird Fascination with Making Disney Dirty,” “Denver’s Towel-Under-the-Door Pot Smoking Law,” and “Photoshop Kim Jong-un Into Any Scene,” the website prides itself on its clever titles and intelligent content. The Food section boasts less pop culture and more practical cooking techniques, but still with creative titles and dynamic topics like “No, Your Favorite Food Is Not Like Crack” and “Eat Me,” about how the “starving Jamestown settlers were cannibals. Good for them!” As such, McMillan’s excerpt, much more calmly titled “The American Way of Eating” after her identical book title, sticks out amidst a sea of cunning humor and lighthearted topics. However, the more serious title indicates the more serious subject matter of the article, and it is not as if Slate.com is completely devoid of serious articles.
The appeal to humor that may have been lost on a typical Slate.com reader in the more commonplace title, McMillan regains in her opening paragraph, when she chooses to quote a wait staff member recalling, “So I take the birthday cake to the table…and then her friend says, ‘She’s taking a shit.’ I mean, what do you say to that?” McMillan claims to have hundreds of stories, but she chooses to quote this one humorous story, and use an un-edited expletive, which sets the tone of the rest of the article. McMillan’s use of style here keeps the reader from losing interest in a potentially dry piece – as may have been suggested by the plain title.
McMillan launches into the article by describing her firsthand experience at Applebee’s as an expediter, careful to clarify that she does not see customers in her position, only food and stories from co-workers. The paragraph she dedicates to meticulously detailing a number of famous Applebee’s entrees, with descriptors like “peppery gravy that’s been nuked in a Styrofoam cup” reinforces the fact that she knows the ins and outs of Applebee’s cooking, enough to know that the food is relatively quick and decent, not high class. By listing each minute detail about food preparation, with step-by-step instructions like “grilled, slice in half and arrayed vertically,” McMillan proves herself to be an authority on the subject of Applebee’s, but also proves herself not to be some sort of biased corporate sponsor by admitting that the gravy has simply been “nuked.” As McMillan aims to persuade readers that people eat at Applebee’s for the fulfillment of the American Dream, not necessarily the food or price of it, this tactic establishes her ethos and eliminates doubts about any bias she may have.
However, McMillan does not rely entirely on her ethos to persuade her audience, instead she effectively incorporates appeals to logos by using extensive history to trace the evolution of middle class dining. As the article progresses, McMillan bases most of her persuasion in logos, through statistics, facts, and history. She continually reminds the reader that her assumptions about customers are just that, and that they come secondhand from wait staff, who actually interact with the “middle-class black and Latino… college student… after-theater drop-in” clientele. McMillan uses disclaimers that “there’s no real way for [her] to know” if her clientele truly represents the middle-class, or just looks like it, and says that Applebee’s “probably constitutes a splurge for most folks” to avoid basing her main argument off of opinion. By avoiding absolutes in speaking from personal experience, she allows the main analysis and persuasion to come from the numbers and the history. Even so, when referencing statistics, McMillan still inserts that the server’s assessment “is probably right,” again avoiding absolutes to suggest that her argument, even when based in numbers, still remains at most a well-supported theory.
The majority of the argument bases its persuasion in statistics, numbers, and history. McMillan relates Applebee’s dinner deals like “Two for Twenty” to average family spending budgets, and links to graphs and figures that back up her claims, which reinforces her ethos as a credible source, and appeals to the reader’s logos by using straightforward reasoning to explain her argument.
McMillan dedicates seven long paragraphs to a regurgitation of the past fifty years in reference to American families and eating out, and to avoid losing her readers somewhere in the past by the end of the history lesson, she chooses to state her main point in the first sentence of her history context exploration – “Restaurants like Applebee’s are just a modern expression of a midcentury invention: the family restaurant.” Everything that follows builds up to that main point, which McMillan later restates in her conclusion to hammer home her argument. There are fewer links to backup graphs and statistics embedded in the text in the historical context paragraphs, instead, a picture of McMillan’s book[1] rests in the middle of the text, to remind the reader that what they are reading on Slate.com has already been published in a book, which restores faith in the information’s credibility. The other image in the article is a stock image of a white nuclear family happily enjoying dinner[2], which is placed under the byline of the article, “Who eats at Applebee’s – and Why?” to suggest this image is who Applebee’s wants you to think is who is eating at Applebee’s.
In setting the historical context, McMillan relies heavily on lists of dates to simplify the information into an easy to understand format, to keep reader’s interest. The quick cause and effect chain of dates eliminates fluff and gets straight to the facts and advance McMillan’s claim that Applebee’s is a part of the American Dream experience. Though the bulk of the history of industrializing sit-down restaurants traces the lesser-known Howard Johnson’s, McMillan ties the point to more popular restaurants like McDonalds, Burger King, and Kentucky Fried Chicken, appealing to the fast food-loving pathos of the average person. As McMillan explains about how food distributor networks like Sysco put lots of different operations under one company to “produce, store, distribute and deliver…foods that could be cooked, reheated, or assembled,” the sentence also houses a lot of verbs in one sentence, which keeps the style as fast-paced and all encompassing as the subject matter.
As the article goes on to describe Applebee’s going international with 140 restaurants abroad, McMillan specifically chooses distinctly American entrees – even though Applebee’s offers the slightly more cultural options such as quesadillas and seafood – to reference when she explains that “you could get the same Firepit burger in Lebanon as in Brazil, the same platter of riblets in Greece as you’d order in Mexico.” These word choices of menu items to feature lead straight into McMillan’s argument that Applebee’s represents the American Dream, as she states in her very next sentence, that “eating at these places became a hallmark of American prosperity, a celebration of mainstream, middle-class success.” The following sentence mentions an opening in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, linking to an article in NY1 that openly praises the new Applebee’s, positioning the restaurant as a hero bringing much needed jobs, an investment in the community, and, as the article says is the most important part, food. In the Slate.com article, almost the entire sentence is hyperlinked to lead to this NY1 article, where other hyperlinks are mostly one or two words with a date, which persuades the reader to open this hyperlink. Linking to such a positive article about the opening of an Applebee’s so close to the end of the article advances McMillan’s argument further about Applebee’s being integral to American life, especially as New York is often seen as the cultural melting pot city and a symbol for the American Dream.
McMillan quickly juxtaposes this uplifting article with harsh facts about New York’s – and specifically Brooklyn’s – poverty and unemployment levels, noting that it is economically irresponsible to even eat at Applebee’s considering the sensibility of cooking at home, and the qualityof other nearby restaurants. By interjecting this statement with “really” in saying that “any sensible working family, really, would be well-advised to cook,” McMillan adds that air of personal language from earlier when she noted that “Applebee’s probably constitutes a splurge,” suggesting again that this sentence is not hard evidence, but more personal opinion. This, along with tying in statistics from earnings at her own Applebee’s, re-establishes her ethos as a credible source on Applebee’s, without saying that her opinion is as much of hard evidence as the appeal to logos in the historical context is. Using personal language in stating her own opinion separates fact from opinion, so the reader knows what conclusions to draw from history, and which to draw based on McMillan’s experience working in an Applebee’s. The concluding paragraph continues this casual style of writing as McMillan writes in the first person to bring home her final persuasive argument, that Applebee’s customers – her customers – are eating at Applebee’s to fulfill their – our - twentieth century American Dream.
McMillan persuades readers that people eat at Applebee’s to fulfill the American Dream in an economy that it has become increasingly harder to do so in. She underlines the argument by appealing to ethos in establishing herself as an expediter at Applebee’s, someone who works directly with food, and gets her interactions with customers secondhand through wait staff. In discussing her own opinions gathered through time at Applebee’s, she speaks directly to the reader in first person, using informal language and avoiding absolutes with terms like “probably” and “really.” However, the core of her argument she tries to communicate through reasoning, using history, statistics, and numbers as her evidence, with multiple hyperlinks to graphs and other sources to back up the credibility of her information and establish her ethos as a scholarly author, not just a knowledgeable source about the entrees of Applebee’s. She keeps the tone fresh and upbeat with personal anecdotes and simplified history, which shows an awareness of keeping her audience engaged, especially when the book is excerpted on Slate.com, a website that prides itself on its witty commentary. McMillan attacks her argument with a logos and an ethos approach, combined to effectively persuade readers into comprehending her answer to the question, “Who eats at Applebee’s?”
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