Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation was popular and even spawned a movie. I was listening to it yesterday and noticed that the references were mostly from the 1990s. Makes sense, it was published in 2003. So, here we are, ten years later and it seems like fast food is pretty much the same as ever: unhealthy, ubiquitous, bad pay, crime magnets, and all the other things Schlosser pointed out.
Some things, though, may have improved. Schlosser claimed that tainted meat could not be easily recalled, for example. Maybe that’s changed and I just don’t know about it. Legislation in Australia to tighten up fast food seems to mostly be of the band-aid variety-- chains must post nutrition information. Not that the food must be actually be any more nutritious. If anything, the current trend is toward bigger and badder fast food, so far as I can tell. A restaurant opened near my home where you can order stuff like this. Yeah, those are donuts for buns.
Were changes made elsewhere, such as the US? Any moves afoot to legislate unfavorably toward fast food chains and the food processors that supply them? What needs doing?
I’ve actually noticed the opposite. More and more fast food restaurants are including items with fresh fruits and vegetables, drinks other than soda, and healthier kids meals.
Would you be concerned if the meat was tainted? How about if the burgers were marketed specifically to children, and maybe advertised in classrooms? What if eating a single one of these burgers had immediate adverse health effects and eating a few a week was likely to kill you?
You’re told all the time what you can and cannot eat. It says right on the cat food package you’re not supposed to eat it. Every country has books full of laws about what can be sold as food. Stores can’t sell food with botulism in it, because botulism is bad for people.
And it really isn’t about telling people what they can’t eat. There are, or were, other concerns with fast food than “it’s bad for you”. Things like government lobbying by private interest groups to relax food standards, dangerous work conditions, and an entire industry sector that has minimum wage as a business model. You missed most of the issues I mentioned in your rush to affirm the right to eat badly.
Even sven says that she’s noticed progress. There probably has been. It seemed to me that fast food received a lot of attention about 10 years ago (like McLibel and Super Size Me, in addition to FFN) and I’m wondering if the current lack of focus means that things are better or maybe the industry just was successful in changing its image by putting bottled water on the menu and running a few ads.
Is there reason to believe that fast food restaurants are any more prone to tainted food than supermarkets? The last ten years of food incidents don’t seem to suggest that they are. Interestingly, the most recent outbreak of e. coli catalogued by the CDC involved organic spinach.
Unfortunately this isn’t necessarily a good thing. Recent research indicates that many consumers think a cheeseburger plus a salad has less calories than the burger on it’s own. Other research has shown that including healthy options increases sales of the unhealthiest product lines.
I have mixed thoughts on this topic. I have no objection to folk doing whatever they want with their bodies, but I’m not thrilled with my tax/insurance dollars paying for their actions. And given the prevalence of advertising and other efforts by large businesses, I’m not sure the average consumer’s food “choices” are entirely independent and informed.
Probably the best alternative I could come up with would be for “unhealthy” food (yeah - like we could ever get agreement on defining THAT!) would be taxed similarly to smokes and booze, with the taxes going towards health care for the poor.
In my job I daily encounter folk who are morbidly obese, and they just can’t understand why they also experience diabetes, hypertension, COPD, musculoskeletal issues…
The salad has 10 more calories than the burger, but it’s a large salad, large enough to be a meal on its own. It’s customary to eat fries (at least 230 calories for a small fry) and usually drink a soda with the burger. And the 450 calories quoted is for that salad with “crispy” (breaded & fried) chicken. With grilled chicken, it’s only 320.
HOW stupid do you need to be to think burger + salad = less calories than just burger? Is McDonalds running some kind of anti-calories are in salads ad?
Actually, the opposite, if FFN is (still) accurate. Schlosser contended that fast food companies pushed for weaker food laws, benefited thereby in the form of lower meat prices, but shielded themselves from the blowback because they had the purchasing power to demand a certain level of food quality-- if I recall correctly. I hope I’m not misrepresenting his argument. I don’t have a paper copy of the book, makes it hard to check.
According to the Time link from post 1, the Chicken Ranch Fully Loaded Taco Salad had or has the most calories of any item on the Taco Bell menu.
The Time list also has items from Applebee’s, Starbucks, and Outback Steakhouse, chains I usually consider not to be fast food. I also didn’t realize how bad for you their food can be.
Denmark had a “fat tax”, the first of its kind, but it was done away with. I think a tax approach could work but has pitfalls.
McDonald’s, at least, has stopped selling “Supersized” items, has increased their marketing of salads, fruits, wraps, and other slightly less terrible foods, especially to kids. They switched to a trans fat-free oil for frying. They print the calorie content of their food right on the menu and have nutritional guides in the dining area.
All in the last decade. I’d say things are getting better. Did you expect them to just switch their entire business model to health food?
But if IIRC, doesn’t he specifically talk about Mad Cow Disease, and heavily imply that fast food could spread it much faster and more severely than traditional markets?
Count me among the people who were never impressed by the argument in the first place. If people want to eat fast food, that’s their right.
I also think the “threat” of obesity is extremely overblown as well, although I might be convinced otherwise if we started using a better measure of it than BMI.
If I remember correctly, the mad cow disease issue (along with others) had more to do with the meat packing industry than fast food restaurants and if fast food spreads it faster and more severely it’s just a function of the popularity of fast food rather than any practices of the fast food industry itself. It’s not like the factory making Bubba Burgers grinds meat from a single cow and then thoroughly cleans all the equipment before moving on to the next.
In order for you to hold these things up as a counter to the argument about telling other people what they may eat, you first have to convince me that any of these concerns are beliefs you actually hold, rather than things you came up with to try to back-rationalize your desire to live in a society where you never have to look at fat people. So far I’ve been rather unimpressed by the anti-food crusaders’ explanations of themselves.
Of course we would. But why single out fast food in this regard? Is fast food any more likely to be tainted than canned food, or vegetables, or gourmet restaurant food?
Why should that worry me? Candy has been advertised to children for the last 4, 000 years at least. Why should it worry me that it is still happening?
In state run classrooms? Sure that worries me. I don’t believe that anything should be advertised in the classrooms of state run schools. But I’ve seen no evidence that this is occurring for fast foods. whereas I know that it is occurring for things like of toothpaste.
So why should I be more concerned with fast food food than any other product?
What if eating just one turned people green, and eating a few a week turned them into the Incredible Hulk?
What if a frog had wings? Would that mean that it wouldn’t bump its arse on the ground when it hopped?
I’m not going to waste time speculating on any of these outrageous claims absent some actual evidence.
Wrong.
I am often told what I shouldn’t eat. But I can’t think of anything that I am told that I can’t eat.
No, it says that I am not *supposed *to eat it. If I wish to, I can choose to eat cat food on the front steps of the police station with no fear of reprisal.
Based upon imminent, legitimate health concerns or animal welfare concerns. None of the objections you raise have anything to do with imminent health or animal welfare concerns.
Are you seriousy suggesting that society should employ the same standards for the single most toxic substance known to man as for foodstuff that has no health effects at all when consumed in moderation?
I it isn’t about telling people what to eat, then why harp on about banning or restricting fast food?
Doesn’t every single group in the word have a private interest group that lobbies government to relax standards?
Can you provide any evidence at all that fast food is worse in this regard than say, environmental groups or gun owners?
Once again, can you provide that fast food is worse in this regard than say, the finance industry or forestry?
What does that even mean? The minimum wage is a legislated standard. How can it be a business model?
Nobody missed them, You failed to provide any evidence for them or, in teh owrst cases, explain what they actually mean.
No, it’s simply that trendy people jump onto trendy causes, and then abandon them to jump onto some new trendy cause. They never cared about the issue, much less understood it. It was just a way to label themselves as trendies.
Once you’ve been around for a few decades, you will realise that these things come and go on a cycle of five years or so. In my lifetime we’ve had:
Baby seals
Nuclear war
Whaling
Amazon deforestation
Homelessness
Wearing Fur
Multiculturalism
Fast Food
Global Warming
Multinationalism
Those are the ones I can recall anyway. They were all issues driven by Hollywood celebrities and twenty-somehting trendies. They all had their own popular movies and TV shows, or often a string of movies and TV shows. The vast majority of people never cared about any of those issues or knew anything about them. They didn’t abandon those causes because things got better. They abandoned them because you can’t be trendy supporting a cause that’s 10 years old and that the common people are talking about.
And the other thing they all have in common is that pretty much the only people still talking about it 10 years later are the people who were twenty-something trendies at the peak.
Obesity is a problem associated with fast food, but fast food is not the cause of obesity. Obesity is not the only problem associated with fast food. I’ve talked about some of them. Yet for some reason, people jump to the conclusion that the goal behind questioning fast food is to ban it or that the reason why people are concerned about fast food is that they get grossed out by fat people. In my post I straight up said, “it really isn’t about telling people what they can’t eat,” and I didn’t say anything about fat people.
Something is a problem or it isn’t. You appear to be making up problems that just don’t exist. Real problems have been identified with fast food, problems that have nothing to do with obesity.
