Reading and writing are two skills that all professionals need.

It is
a known fact that most, if not all jobs, require a strong set of skills in
these areas. One must comprehend the information they are reading
and be able to construct an effective essay. The rhetorical analysis is a
tool that is provided to readers and writers to fully understand and
analyze the purpose for the article, and how they appeal to the
rhetorical strategies (ethos, logos, pathos). By appealing to the
strategies when reading, the reader is able to identify if the writer used
ethos, pathos, and logos when developing the article and it allows the
reader to go deeper into the meaning.
In this particular assignment, we were to chose an article that
was to revolve around the subject of our research paper. The topic for
my research paper is the increasing amount of food waste produced by
schools free breakfast and lunch programs. After we chose the article
we were to fully identify the tools (ethos, pathos, logos) used
throughout the article and recognize if the authors tools were
effective on providing information to the reader..
This article, Its just so much waste. A qualitative investigation
of food waste in a universal free School Breakfast Program by Stacy A
Blondin, Holly Carmichael Djang, Nesly Metayer, Stephanie AnzmanFrasca and Christina D Economos was about researching the waste that
the school breakfast program is causing. The authors conducted an
observation where they looked at ten elementary schools in large

urban school district that was applying free breakfast in schools. This
observation consisted of interviewing school district stakeholders. The
information they collected was analyzed and formed into themes. The
information they collected was (what was being eaten, if the students
are given enough time to eat, what meals they preferred, if the taste of
the food was impacting food waste, did teacher, parents, cafeteria staff
and administration know about the waste of food, etc.). In conclusion
members of the school recognized food waste as a problem, stated
numerous contributing factors, and designed multiple strategies to
combat this issue of food waste.
In the article itself the authors do not really establish if they are
credible to be writing about this topic. That is when I decided to search
the authors of the article. After looking up the authors I learned that
the team who conducted research were all credible and relevant to
the topic. One of the authors, Stacy A Blondin, got her bachelors in
Psychology from Harvard, earned a masters degree from Johns
Hopkins School of Public Health in Nutrition and earned a PhD from
Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. Holly Djang has
over thirteen years of experience designing and leading applied
research and program evaluation projects fro nonprofits, school
districts, government agencies and universities. Nesly Metayer,
Stephanie Anzman-Frasca and Christina Economos also attended Tufts
University and their research and degrees are centered around aspects

on the environment, child health, and nutrition. All the members of this
observation groups were fully qualified. They are educated and have
gathered enough information to discuss this topic, however, they failed
to state their credibility in the article itself. The authors do present
many statistics and outside sources which helped their credibility and
gave readers a visual on the amounts of food waste in America.
I feel that the genre of the text can slightly limit the information
found in it. The group of authors are all focused on the same purpose,
to show member of the school district what free breakfast programs
are causing. They limit their information by strictly focusing on free
breakfast. However there are other branches of the meal program that
also contributes to food waste like lunch and summer programs. They
briefly touched what free lunch programs cause and do not include the
free summer meals provided to students.
The organization of the article was very good. They authors
categorized all their data into sections, this made their information
easier to understand. If someone needed to focus on a particular
section on the observation, their organization technique would make it
easy. I feel that the organization of the article plays a big role in
achieving the purpose. Braking down the data collected and
categorizing it into sections made it easier to see how the components
work with each other to achieve the purpose. Throughout the article

there was a lot of specialized vocabulary that was used and before
reading that article and the data they collected they informed the
readers of the vocabulary being used. The authors informed the
readers of the members that make up the stakeholders community
(Elementary-school students, parents, teachers, cafeteria managers
and school principals). Doing this step made the information collected
easier to understand. The authors wanted to know the reason for all
the food waste and came to the conclusion that plate waste had to do
with what was being served and the amount of time given to students
to finish their meals. They analyzed the data collected and provided
readers with items that were going uneaten and thrown away.
The authors understood that every year more and more food is
going to waste due to free breakfast and they felt the members of the
stakeholders community should give their perspectives on the matter.
They gathered all the viewpoints of the members and put the
information they collected into a graph. This made the material easier
to read and understand. The authors appealed to emotion by giving an
estimate of how much food is wasted and gave peoples opinions on
food waste. You can clearly see the appeal to emotion when Blondin,
S., Djang, H., Metayer, N., & Economos, C. (2015) state, Participantsused
avarietyofdisparagingadjectivestodescribefoodwasteinthemodel:...itsterrible.
Itsashame...,itsdaunting,...itswretchedanditsridiculousamongothers.These
descriptorswerereflectedinaccompanyingpersonalsentimentsandemotions:...Ifeel

bad...,itmakesmesick,...makesmefeelrealbadandithurtsmetoseeallthatfood
goingtowaste.(p.1569)By adding the opinions of the teachers and
cafeteria staff also helps to show readers the importance of this
situation.
In conclusion the authors wanted to bring light to a very
important issues. They felt that members of the school should come up
with resolutions for the massive amount of food waste produced every
day. By using the rhetorical strategies, the authors make a good
argument and support their ideas with research they conducted. By
giving insight on the opinions of members from the schools helps back
up their argument and helps them to be viewed as more credible.

References
Blondin, S., Djang, H., Metayer, N., & Economos, C. (2015). Its just so
much waste. A

qualitative investigation of food waste in a universal

free School Breakfast

Program. Cambridge Journals, 18(09), 1565-

1577. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1368980014002948