Fast Food Has Many Advantages

1651 Words7 Pages
Fast food has many advantages. It gives consumers options that let them decide if they want to eat quickly and cheaply or in a more conventional manner. It provides poorer people an option to eat out for a modicum of time and money. But the problems with fast food are quite obvious and too numerous to count. Fast food is ecologically problematic, focusing on production of unsustainable levels of beef and requiring practices like slash-and-burn agriculture and incredibly exploitative Third World agriculture (Tennesen). It requires paying workers an extremely low wage, and since so many workers at one point or another work at McDonald's or something like it, it contributes to income inequality (Schlosser; Ritzer). Many workers get locked into a pattern of being unable to do anything but work at a fast food restaurant, kept from developing any other skills and stuck with a bad resume. Fast food is unhealthy and has helped spark a wave of obesity, both childhood and adult. As other countries begin to adopt fast food models, they too become more and more obese; Japan has had an obesity problem beginning, even though for decades they were among the least obese and nutritionally healthiest countries on the planet (Schlosser). There are many good elements of the fast food model, but they do not need to be mixed in with the bad. Fast food has been more harmful than it has been beneficial to America, but there are ways of making fast food healthier, less ecologically destructive, and better paid. The basis of the fast food model has been famously identified by George Ritzer as focused on efficiency, calculability, predictability and control. These four elements, as even Ritzer and Schlosser (author of Fast Food Nation and one of the foremost critics of fast food) admit, are positive. Efficiency just means producing things with less waste. Calculability means being able to

More about Fast Food Has Many Advantages

Open Document