Fast Food

America's love affair with fast food reaches back to 1921 when Walter Anderson and Billy Ingram opened the first White Castle restaurant. By the 1950s, Carl's Jr. and McDonald's were established, and in 1958, McDonald's sold its 100 millionth hamburger. While other fast food restaurants existed—they were usually drive-ins with carhops—none changed the natural and dietary landscape so thoroughly as did the three mentioned here. They were later joined by other fast food restaurants, including Wendy's, Burger King, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, and today there are nearly 200,000 fast food restaurants in the United States. While early love of fast food was tied to the novelty of the automobile and the accompanying growth of an entire infrastructure for a newly mobile society, today fast food has simply become a ubiquitous fact of our existence.

Not only do fast food restaurants themselves pervade our surroundings, fast food can be found everywhere, from airports to grocery stores to zoos. Further, billboards, television, and radio advertisements bombard us with pictures of fast food, visions of happy people eating fast food, and jingles and slogans about having it “our way.” Fast food is also heavily marketed to children, and in addition to simply offering Happy Meals augmented with toys, billions are spent yearly on product and movie tie-ins designed to attract children. Further, McDonald's is the largest private operator of playgrounds and one of the country's top toy distributors. Research has shown that rising obesity rates in children are linked to the fast food marketing efforts directed at them, particularly since the 1980s.

About a quarter of the American population visits a fast food restaurant each day, and nearly half the money used by families to buy food is spent on fast food. McDonald's hires about one million people each year—more than any other U.S. organization, public or private. Fast food workers are the largest group of minimum-wage earners in the United States, the vast majority of whom work part time, lack benefits, and leave after a few months of employment. Fast food, then, impacts us in ways far beyond the 15 minutes it [Page 159]takes to buy and consume a burger and fries. Books, movies, and documentaries have been produced detailing our relationship with fast food, like Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me, a 2004 documentary that follows Spurlock as he eats nothing but McDonald's for 28 days and gains 25 pounds, fat accumulation in his liver, and soaring cholesterol numbers, as well as experiences depression, mood swings, and a plummeting sex drive. Eric Schlosser's 2001 book, Fast Food Nation, examines various aspects of the fast food industry, from slaughterhouse to advertising. Schlosser provides a sobering account of the revolutionary force that fast food has unleashed on us dietetically, economically, and culturally. This focus on fast food's impact is part of a larger recent movement to reexamine our relationship with food; authors like Schlosser, Michael Pollan, and Peter Pringle are helping to direct attention to methods of food production and to eating habits in general, and fast food restaurants are responding in various ways, from offering healthy alternatives to standard menu items to scaling back on portion sizes. Despite these and other changes, fast food remains, for the most part, incredibly unhealthy and far more costly than its inexpensive price tag suggests.

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