TOW #11 (TEXT): Don’t Like the American Way of Meat? Blame That First Thanksgiving Meal by Maureen Ogle

Maureen Ogle, a historian and author of several books, wrote this opinion piece in order to shed light on the origin of American meat eating habits. While ostensibly seeming that this article is just a history lesson, Ogle uses narrative writing and cause and effect in order to logically show that Thanksgiving may be a day of problems as opposed to thanks. Ogle starts her article by taking the reader back to the days where colonists were first arriving in the New World. Ogle uses a narrative style of writing such that the reader feels like they are learning about the history of the colonists. This basic establishment of information allows for the reader to understand where exactly our meat eating habits come from. Since Ogle is trying to show that Thanksgiving was to blame for our unhealthiness, she takes the reader back to the time period so that they can understand how exactly Thanksgiving affected our unhealthy diets. After establishing this base knowledge, Ogle takes the information and connects it to today's society to show the effect on our diets. This cause and effect as seen by this quote, "meat-centric diets are killing us,"(par. 7) shows how the Thanksgiving meal directly is hurting us today. By using cause and effect, the reader understands that Ogle's argument makes sense and this appeals to the readers logos. All of these rhetorical devices allow Ogle to further solidify her claim that Thanksgiving is the blame of our meat heavy diet. By showing the change over time, using cause and effect, as well as narrative writing, Ogle even makes me feel like Thanksgiving is to blame for our meat heavy diets. I think that Ogle did a good job establishing her point, however I think that she tried to make too far of a stretch by connecting our meat habit to Thanksgiving as opposed to just colonization. I understand she did so because of the holiday, however I think her point would've been more correct, and effective if it was just talking about the connection to the natives as opposed to Thanksgiving as a whole.