A Real Look at Chipotle

In today’s world consumers are exposed to rhetoric everywhere using ethos, pathos, and logos. For example, the restaurant chain Chipotle has produced two lengthy ads, Scarecrow and Back To The Start, which appeal strongly to our sense of emotion and logic. In these two beautifully illustrated ads we see powerful signs of pathos and logos. The ad accomplishes this by showing the cruelty of exposing confined animals to antibiotics in order to produce more meat. The ad shows that eating chemically enhanced meat is immoral, and by doing so persuades the consumer to eat at Chipotle because they only use meat from non modified farm bred animals.

The short film Scarecrow takes place in a not so distant future where everyone eats from a factory known as Crow Food, Inc. where everything is dark and gloomy, all the animals are genetically modified, and scarecrows work for crows. Later in the ad, we see that the crows are hiding the fact that they are using modified meat by putting a wall up with an ad saying that their food is all natural. Eventually the scarecrow decides that he has had enough and leaves the town to start his own farm. Later he opens up a restaurant and slowly people start to come over and the world is becoming a better place. Chipotle uses pathos here by showing the misery on the animals faces as they are being locked up and hidden. 

The short film Back To The Start is about a farmer who slowly turns his farm into a factory then a lab where the animals are once again being pumped with chemicals. At the end he reflects on the ugliness and unhappiness around him and realizes that he has made a mistake. In an attempt to fix his mistake, he puts everything as it was in the beginning. Hence the title Back To The Start. All the animals are back in the fields and everyone is happy. At the very end of the film the farmer is loading a crate into a truck with the Chipotle logo on it. In this film Chipotle uses pathos by showing the amount of empathy and compassion the farmer has for his animals which encourages the consumer to support the farmer as well as Chipotle.

Both of these films evoke enough emotion to make a grown man cry. As if that weren't enough, Chipotle posted a scientifically oriented video which introduced a movement that the company is backing called Meat Without Drugs. The video explains the dangers of chemically altering live stock with antibiotics. It states that antibiotics were made to treat humans with illnesses, as you could have guessed. However, if antibiotics are used too often then a type of super bacteria will eventually arise that is immune to todays antibiotics. The ad suggests that everyone eating this meat will have a chance of getting this incurable bacteria. The ad uses imagery which portrays the super bacteria cells as metal spiked weaponry which inspires fear in the viewer. Chipotle encourages us that that this does not have to happen as long as we don’t raise animals this way. The consumer has a right to make the correct decision. This appeals to logos and pathos because they are using both fear and logic to persuade the viewer to eat at Chipotle.