On Fast Food
Before coming to Malden just now, I spent some time reading Barry Glassner's The Gospel of Food while eating at McDonald's. For a cheap, fast, and (since I got their Asian salad) even healthy meal, it can't easily be beat.
As it happens, I'm currently reading his chapter on fast food, in which he mostly criticizes the overboard reactions of critics to McDonald's and other fast food joints.
One thing that bothered me back when I first watched Supersize Me was the glaring (to me, at least) lack of any mention of economic issues. The guy's girlfriend was a vegan chef, so he was privileged enough to have ready and cheap access to plenty of healthy, low-fat food whenever he wanted it. Even if he didn't have her, he still seemed a pretty decently paid middle-class sort of guy. He can afford to spend the money and especially the time required to prepare and eat fresh, healthy food. Here's a quote from Glassner's book:
In Super Size Me, his anti-fast food film released in 2004, Morgan Spurlock eats three large McDonald's meals a day for thirty days and vividly demonstrates that such a regimen is enough to make a healthy thin man fat and enfeebled. But from the vantage point of some less fortunate folks, the picture looks qutie different. Having spent most of his savings and unable to find a job, Les Gapay, a former Wall Street Journal reporter in his mid-fifties, gave up his apartment and moved into the only shelter he had left. "One of the most difficult aspects of living out of my truck," he reported fifteen months into his ordeal with homelessness, "was finding places to go to the bathroom or just to sit during part of the day. I quickly learned the ropes. I often ate at fast-food joints because of the $1 promotional items. Two of those made a meal."
For Gapay and thousands of other homeless people, fast-food places are safe places in which to warm up, while away the hours, and get a hot meal. When I hear activists and food snobs bemoaning the frequency with which low-income Americans patronize fast-food chains, a famously sardonic observation made by Anatole France in the late nineteenth century comes to mind: "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
No one disagrees that the poor, like most of the rest of the population, would do well to eat more fruit and veggies, but where else, for a few bucks, can a person of modest means get the complete, tripartite American meal (meat, potatoes, and vegetable), in a clean setting, with toys and diversions for the kids thrown in at no extra charge? Or should low-income Americans be forced to subsist on the Department of Agriculture's "Thrifty Food Plan," whose recipes, even if followed slavishly, are barely lower in fat and additives than a Quarter Pounder dinner with small fries and a salad, but require hours of shopping and preparation and don't taste nearly as good?
There's also the ideological objections to McD's simply for being a huge corporation. But it is largely because of this that it and other fast-food chains are able to require better practices of their suppliers, and to buy some of the cleanest beef available. It also means that, urban myths aside, the actual kitchen environments in most fast-food places are going to be incredibly clean. I really strongly doubt that the little independently-owned Chinese place I ate at yesterday had a cleaner kitchen or cleaner meat or was supplied by farmers with better treated livestock than the McDonald's I ate at today. There's no corporate oversight and probably less health department scrutiny (and certainly less public scrutiny) of a little mom-and-pop place than there is of a company that everyone loves to hate.
Regarding environmental waste, yeah, the more than a million tons of packaging annually produced by McDonald's sounds pretty bad, though you also have to consider how many thousands of restaurants that counts. And at least McDonald's feeds people, rather than simply adorn their bodies. Glassner writes, "A gold mine in Papua New Guinea called Ok Tedi generates two hundred thousand tons of waster per day, Earthworks reports."
As it happens, I'm currently reading his chapter on fast food, in which he mostly criticizes the overboard reactions of critics to McDonald's and other fast food joints.
One thing that bothered me back when I first watched Supersize Me was the glaring (to me, at least) lack of any mention of economic issues. The guy's girlfriend was a vegan chef, so he was privileged enough to have ready and cheap access to plenty of healthy, low-fat food whenever he wanted it. Even if he didn't have her, he still seemed a pretty decently paid middle-class sort of guy. He can afford to spend the money and especially the time required to prepare and eat fresh, healthy food. Here's a quote from Glassner's book:
In Super Size Me, his anti-fast food film released in 2004, Morgan Spurlock eats three large McDonald's meals a day for thirty days and vividly demonstrates that such a regimen is enough to make a healthy thin man fat and enfeebled. But from the vantage point of some less fortunate folks, the picture looks qutie different. Having spent most of his savings and unable to find a job, Les Gapay, a former Wall Street Journal reporter in his mid-fifties, gave up his apartment and moved into the only shelter he had left. "One of the most difficult aspects of living out of my truck," he reported fifteen months into his ordeal with homelessness, "was finding places to go to the bathroom or just to sit during part of the day. I quickly learned the ropes. I often ate at fast-food joints because of the $1 promotional items. Two of those made a meal."
For Gapay and thousands of other homeless people, fast-food places are safe places in which to warm up, while away the hours, and get a hot meal. When I hear activists and food snobs bemoaning the frequency with which low-income Americans patronize fast-food chains, a famously sardonic observation made by Anatole France in the late nineteenth century comes to mind: "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
No one disagrees that the poor, like most of the rest of the population, would do well to eat more fruit and veggies, but where else, for a few bucks, can a person of modest means get the complete, tripartite American meal (meat, potatoes, and vegetable), in a clean setting, with toys and diversions for the kids thrown in at no extra charge? Or should low-income Americans be forced to subsist on the Department of Agriculture's "Thrifty Food Plan," whose recipes, even if followed slavishly, are barely lower in fat and additives than a Quarter Pounder dinner with small fries and a salad, but require hours of shopping and preparation and don't taste nearly as good?
There's also the ideological objections to McD's simply for being a huge corporation. But it is largely because of this that it and other fast-food chains are able to require better practices of their suppliers, and to buy some of the cleanest beef available. It also means that, urban myths aside, the actual kitchen environments in most fast-food places are going to be incredibly clean. I really strongly doubt that the little independently-owned Chinese place I ate at yesterday had a cleaner kitchen or cleaner meat or was supplied by farmers with better treated livestock than the McDonald's I ate at today. There's no corporate oversight and probably less health department scrutiny (and certainly less public scrutiny) of a little mom-and-pop place than there is of a company that everyone loves to hate.
Regarding environmental waste, yeah, the more than a million tons of packaging annually produced by McDonald's sounds pretty bad, though you also have to consider how many thousands of restaurants that counts. And at least McDonald's feeds people, rather than simply adorn their bodies. Glassner writes, "A gold mine in Papua New Guinea called Ok Tedi generates two hundred thousand tons of waster per day, Earthworks reports."