May 06, 2001 01:32 AM
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Fast food is a worldwide phenomenon. The golden arches of McDonald's are now more widely recognised than the Christian cross.
For taste and convenience fast food cannot be beaten - but at what price?
The industry began innocently enough in the 1950s. All these individualists and mavericks started it but as it got bigger, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s it became a little more ominous. It has pioneered industrial agriculture and is really changing how livestock are raised and how our food is produced. Fast food is some of the most heavily processed food on the planet. When you go to a fast food kitchen you see that just about all the food that arrives there is already frozen, freeze-dried or powdered. Because they don't want to have skilled workers in the kitchen, the food is essentially being reheated or having water added to it to make it look like food that you would normally eat.
When you look in Europe, the British eat more fast foods than any other nation in Europe and the obesity rate is about the highest in Europe - again it is not a simple cause and effect. If you look at obesity as a disease epidemic, there are a number of factors but fast food consumption, unfortunately, is one of them.
Research has found that some toddlers can recognise brand logos before they can recognise their own names. The Golden Arches of McDonald are the glaring example.
These children are being targeted as early as the age of three. The'happy meals' are really directed at children aged 3 to 9 years old. But there are children younger than that who is eating fast food.
If you look world wide, as the fast food consumption increases, so does the obesity rate among children. It is not the only cause of obesity, but it is definitely one of the causes. These companies heavily market their food to children and the food they are marketing to children is very high in fat, sugar and salt. Children aged 6 to 10 years old are having heart attacks because of obesity and there is an incredible rise in diabetes among children. So there is no question that there is a connection between this fast food and obesity among children. What is so dangerous about this is that your eating habits are formed at a very, very early age and as you get older you can resist them and change your diet or you can give into them but in any event they are going to be there very deeply embedded.
When you look at outbreaks of E.coli it is because there is faecal contamination of the meat - and ground beef in particular because of how ground beef is being made in these huge meat grinders that put out almost one million pounds of ground beef a day. So that is the most concerning - the faecal material in the meat.
What is happening is that the fast food chains and the meat packing companies are able to impose many of their costs on the rest of society that isn't reflected in the cheap food. Those costs include the high rate of food poisonings. Millions of people around the world get food poisoning every year. The injuries of the meat packing workers whose medical costs are then being picked up by the community and their welfare costs when they are injured and can't work anymore.
In terms of the livestock, the new intensive and industrial livestock rearing practices really are inhumane to the animals. The poultry are crammed into these chicken houses where they never see sunlight for their entire lives. They hatch in these chicken houses and they are only outdoors on their way to slaughter - so these practices are terribly inhumane. If you visit slaughterhouses, the feedlots and the processing plants and it would make you very angry at how the animals are being treated often and about how the system is being run - in terms of how the workers are being hurt and the quality of the some of the products being shipped
But, as you get to the more advanced animals that are more sentient and that have a more complex personality - the way that cattle have been raised in the US, in these enormous feedlots, in some ways that is the most inhumane. There are up to 100, 000 cattle penned into these feedlots and they are essentially living in their own filth and manure.
One of the problems the fast food places have created for themselves is that they have spent decades now and billions and billions of dollars producing certain food preferences. By targeting children at a very early age by selling them hamburgers and fries and fried chicken, it is very hard overnight to change the food preferences that they have done such a good job at creating.
Right now they are really competing with one another by offering larger and larger portions of this food and that is very harmful. If a grown-adult wants to get a triple cheeseburger and super-sized fries that is one thing but the way that these companies are now offering larger and larger portions in their children's meals and that has all kinds of potential health consequences. Given the food technology that we have today, there is no reason that they couldn't be serving much healthier food especially in their children's meals.
