Fast Food Eating Habits

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Fast food habits are historical in nature--linked to socially learned ways of thinking, by which some particular foods become attractive and others repellent-- reflect on the nature of culture, how it shapes and enforces the rules by which we eat, as well as the extent to which it leaves us open to change. We humans simultaneously cling with dogged persistence to foods we have always eaten and set them aside in order to eat foods we have never tried before. Hence a McDonald's menu that, for the most part, appears to work worldwide must make us think about what is really meant by the term "taste," and just how obstinate we really are about our preferences. Human food habits differ from those of all other, especially in their quite enormous non-specific variety. We are led to wonder how we humans as a species could have managed to survive upon such a dazzling variety of foods, which represent a similarly wide range of preferences. Hardly anything about us is more distinctively human than those foods and those preferences, and how much they vary around the globe. Nonetheless a small number of foods, representative of a single modern society, prepared in highly standardized ways, can apparently find passionate consumers nearly everywhere. Historical reflection may help us think more clearly about that somewhat puzzling reality. It is reasonable to suppose that most communities in history actually subsisted on a relatively small number of different foods, drawn from a limited repertory of available food choices. There was a time--actually, not that many centuries ago--when human groups fed themselves almost entirely on foods drawn from a surrounding region only a few square miles in area. Indeed, this was true for humankind as a whole, and for nearly its entire career on earth. Even after the rise of urban civilization some five thousand years ago, most

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