The Bigger Picture of Fast Food

McDonald’s. The classic American enterprise that has produced the second most recognizable fictional figure in the world (only second to Santa Claus) in Ronald McDonald and the company which best represents entire fast food industry. I find it interesting talking to my parents and people their age who grew up with the fast food boom and watched as McDonald’s grew from a dozen stores to over 30,000 today, along with the larger effects that came with it and the rest of the fast food industry. As Eric Schlosser points out in his book Fast Food Nation, there are certainly larger ramifications to the choices we make in what we eat three times a day, and the companies that we keep in business by doing so, like McDonalds. I disagree with Schlosser when he makes the point that people don’t really think about what they eat as long as it tastes good. While many people do in fact that fast food tastes delicious, I think that people still know that it is unhealthy and think about it but they just don’t care. If you haven’t seen Food, Inc., the documentary does a great job answering this very question and points out the larger ramifications of the way we get our food in this country such as animal treatment/cruelty, underpaid farmers that are subjected to greater corporations, underpaid workers at factories, and simply a bad product that is made and consumed by a quarter of American adults weekly, according to Schlosser.
Schlosser continues to elaborate and introduce new ramifications of the fast food industry in Fast Food Nation. The larger ones of the fast food industry are countless, and the industry is only growing. For example, since 1973 (when McDonald’s was established) minimum wage in the U.S. has steadily declined. McDonald’s might have a lot of employees, but most of them are making minimum wage that is much less than a comfortable living. Another effect of the fast food industry is that when my parents’ generation grew up, three fourths of their parents income went to buying and making food. Nowadays, that number is a fraction of what it was then and half of the money spent goes to restaurants (almost all fast food ones). Clearly, food is cheaper today than ever and its quality is probably worse than ever. In addition, because of fast food chains like McDonald’s and others like Banana Republic in the clothing industry, Schlosser points out that almost all of our lives have been “franchised” with our reliance on these chains. The reason for this is that Americans like having the trust in the consistency of the product of these chains. That certainly goes for almost all of the fast food industry as well. Schlosser also asserts that jobs like meatpacking used to be skilled and well paid, and because of the fast food industry they are now minimum wage paying and machine like. Cleary these larger ramifications are a result of the booming fast food industry, as Schlosser describes in both Fast Food Nation and Food, Inc. In the end, the negative effects clearly outweigh how tasty a Big Mac may be, or how many playgrounds McDonald’s sponsors for the obese kids that get to play on them because of their products.