Yes, everything has gotten better. People are more cognizant of their desire to actually eat real food. The reason some posters think that chain pizza used to be good is because when you’re 12 years old you are stupid and you like things that are awful. I can use an excellent salad bar at my grocery store, get top-notch hippie-raised meat and cheese at Chipotle, eat a Wendy’s sandwich that 100% chicken breast that looks like a chicken breast, not a pressed circle of extruded chicken substance, and so on, today. I can find an authentic Italian restaurant serving hand-made, oven-fired pizza and run by someone who was born in either Italy or New York, in nearly every city in America including the Deep South. Very little of this was available in 1990, certainly not for fast-food prices. And the further back you go, the worse it is. I don’t know if people who grew up in the 50s even understood the concept of “fresh food.” The reason people used to be so obsessed with laxatives and regularity was because they ate frozen creamed pork shavings for every meal. While people may be eating more calories these days or otherwise have unhealthy attitudes to food in a macro sense, the culinary quality of the average meal is phenomenally better than it used to be.
Ummm… They serve something that is chickenlike- textureless, overmarinated, boiled and vaccupacked, foodvinyl strips.
This is going to sound weird in a conspiracy theory way, which is a way that I actively try not to be … but I think the fast food companies have tricked us into thinking the food has gotten better. It’s better presentation, with more variety on the surface, and lets the franchises justify charging more. Underneath, though, I think they’re using lower quality ingredients and doing things like pumping up the salt and fat to create the feeling that the food is satisfying.
And I really don’t object to eating fast food, it is what it is. I will, however, always try to find and sample local fast food options … the guy with the taco cart could be 100x better or 100x times worse than Taco Bell. The 100x times worse scenario is scary, but the times when you find something 100x better are amazing.
I think that they’ve gotten a little better.
Now, mind you, where I grew up, we didn’t even get our first McDonald’s until I was ten and then it was 12 miles away in the county seat, so my judgement may be a bit colored.
What I like is that I can get a salad that’s made of something besides iceburg lettuce as a side at most places (I like fries, but try to watch the carbs). The coffee has also vastly improved. But then again, these weren’t choices that I’d have made as a teenager.
As far as pizza goes, I generally go for a locally owned chain that uses a real pizza oven rather than a conveyer heating system. The chain pizzas that I eat (my boss orders in once a week) have more topping options for someone who isn’t fond of the common pepperoni / sausage limitations of thirty years ago.
Mexican? As Aesiron stated, Taco Bell is really it’s own food type. Once in a while, something sounds good from there, but I don’t confuse it with actual Mexican food purchased inexpensively at the taco stand.
I’ve mostly been abstaining in recent years, mainly as I’m annoyed by the way they’ve been using starchy/HFCS tricks to cheapen the offerings, so take this with the disgruntled grain of salt that comes from having binged last night at a big-city Wendy’s and adjacent Taco Bell (big cities tend to screw up fast food because of the crappy felon/dropout workforce and low QC, IME). The binge (and I am something of a connoiseur of binges) was deeply unsatisfying and annoying. Soggy fries, tasteless burger, doughy room temp. burritos.
Oh, and this is vaguely, no, not vaguely, unsettling:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/us/31meat.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=beef%20amonia&st=cse
I don’t eat a lot of fast food, but I think the choices have gotten better. I haven’t noticed much of a degradation in quality, although there has been some. All fast-food delivery pizza I’ve ever had invariably sucks. I’ve tried to like Papa John’s or Dominos, but I just can’t do it. McDonald’s fries have gotten worse, but I can’t tell any difference in their burgers (which I actually like.) Now, either my tastes have changed, but I seem to remember Wendy’s being awesome, but the last few times I’ve visited them over the last four or five years, they’ve been worse than McDonald’s or Burger King (which I especially dislike for that weird flame-broiled kerosene flavor.) On the other hand, the BK fries are better than when I was a kid.
So, some foods have gotten better, some worse, most have stayed the same to me. What is better is the choice. I don’t particularly like Chipotle, but it’s a hell of a lot better than Taco Bell (which I will only patronize if I’m famished and it’s the only place open in sight), and I can at least get a beer there. Baja Fresh is also better than TB, to me. I can find a Five Guy’s or Culver’s around Chicagoland now, when I want a fast-food burger (and there’s even a Fatburger outpost here. I hope one day In ‘n’ Out comes into town, because they’re my favorite.) All are vastly superior to the Big Three.
So, with the quality about the same and the choices a bit better, I’d lean that from a consumer’s perspective, I prefer the fast food choices and products of the 00s-10s more than that of the 80s/90s.
I’ve always felt that KFC was fantastic (if, admittadly, about as unhealthy as food can be). I know Colonel Sanders himself hated the potatoes and gravy, but I always had a soft spot for fake mashed potatoes. Also, I want to praise KFC’s newish “Grilled Chicken” as dammmn good.
I think that fast food has tended somewhat upwards over my lifetime; part of this is the increase of the “fast casual” stuff, but even the typical stuff seems to pay better attention to ingredients and flavor.
Oh, except McDonald’s changing the McNuggets recipe. Am I alone in vastly preferring the old recipe to the new “white-meat” one?
Regarding pizza, I’ve heard some horror stories about pizza in the 1950s and 1960s. I know its not “fast food”, but my father and uncle claim that Chef Boyardee (and similar) “pizza kits” were bad enough for them to have thought pizza was universally awful. Took moving to an urban area to change their minds.
Were the “old-time” pizza chains any good? Shakey’s? What about Pizza Huts back in the 1960s?
In the case of Dunkin Donuts the answer is no. Twenty years ago they used to cook their donuts at the store every 4 hours. Now in my area (south of Boston) only one fries them at the shop. All the other ones have them trucked in. (The difference is noticible.)
Ya know, the Pizza Kits are one of my guilty pleasures. Here’s a recipe for rememberance and inspiration:
Broke Ass, White Trash, Ghetto Gourmet Pizza
Pizza and Toppings:
2 Boxes of Boyardee Pizza
1 brick of mozzarella grated
1 stick of whole dry Pepperoni sliced in buttons (it’s near the summersausage)
1 tin of anchovies
Whatever veggies you have around- chopped
Doctored Sauce:
3 cloves of garlic crushed and chopped
1 tsp or to taste of smashed anchovies
1 tsp. Crushed Red Pepper Seeds
2 tsp. Italian Herbs/Seasoning
Pinch of sugar
drizzle of Olive Oil
Prepare the crust according to the Box directions. Sautee the garlic and smushed anchovies in a saucepan with the oil till lightbrown. Add the pizza sauce from the kits and the reamining sauce ingredients. Mix and remove from Heat, Ladle on prepared crusts on pizza pans. Sprinkle on the included Parmesan, Grated brick Mozz, and layer generously with the dry Pepperoni and whatever veggies you wish. Bake according to the Box instructions. Break out the Pizza Cutter and eat Hot… Make sure you have some ice cold Hawaiian Punch on hand to Prevent a Burnt ruuf.
Coffee is another area of big improvement. McDonalds coffee is objectively high-quality and beats its competitors in taste tests. I think we can thank Starbucks for making coffee popular, and getting people to start thinking about the quality of the stuff. Of course a cup of coffee costs three times what it did 20 years ago no matter where you order it, but it’s a very rare thing to walk into any national chain and order a cup of coffee and get something terrible, anymore.
No, you’re not. I was HIGHLY aggravated when they switched; the old nuggets were tastier & juicier. Doesn’t stop me from eating the new ones, but I would love for them to bring the old ones back. Not everyone likes white meat poultry.
No, it’s food poisoning, because there is usually someone else in the house complaining of the same problem, and usually, yes, they had the same thing I did.
Sorry, I honestly have to say that I don’t believe you. Maybe your whole family has undiagnosed allergies or something. How many people do you think eat at McDonald’s every day worldwide? A million? If a twelfth of them were getting sick, don’t you think the place would have a reputation?
And yet you keep eating there, even though there’s apparantly an 8% chance of getting food poisoning?
The Baja Fresh near me is disgusting. Salsa that tastes like ketchup, soft tacos that taste like the aluminum foil they come wrapped in, cheese that reminds one of yellow colored plastic.
I think American fast food has certain gotten more diverse. Mexican was barely known when I grew up let alone the New Orleans style or Japanese places in my local mall.
Can I ask you what the hell you are doing continuing to eat at McDonalds, then?
Old ones have gotten worse and new ones have taken their place as good. As an average it’s about the same.
Are you familiar with the turnaround time for food poisoning? It’s just as likely that you and the other people in the household ate something tainted at home. More likely, in fact, than repeat food poisoning hitting multiple people who presumably ate different meals from the same restaurant time after time after time.
Yeah, but that’s not really fair; I suspect they use heroin in those things.