Too Convenient
Fast Food has invented a new era. The introduction of fast food into our lives is discussed in the article “In Praise of Fast Food” by Rachael Laudan who asserts fast food’s convenience has improved our diets, lifestyles, and love for food, allowing more time for women to get jobs, and more. Laudan explains that fast food or processed food has put an end to the old days of women slaving away in the kitchen to make food from scratch, food perishing in the blink of an eye, miserable tasting food, and malnourishment.
While fast food has brought a positive change to the nourishment of our country, we have become overly dependent on what is convenient. This over-dependence has pushed a healthy lifestyle past its limits, causing people to become overweight. Fast food is cheap and easy, but implementing a social cost would help deter customers and pay for their future externalities from eating too much fast food.
Getting food before and after the invention of fast food is light and day. Instead of spending hours in the kitchen, we can go get a meal served to us well below 25 minutes, maybe more. Now people can reliably go to a fast food restaurant whenever they get hungry and get as much food as they want for a low cost. We can get food through a window, we don’t even need to get out of our cars. The drive-thru has helped endorse our laziness and keep the time for getting food almost irrelevant. Some see this convenience as a blessing but I and others including Spencer Smead believe it has caused a path to obesity. Smead’s article “America’s Fast Food Obsession” explains the harm of the growing obsession with fast food. One of the main factors that contributed to Smead’s research is fast food’s convenience.
Consumers abuse the power of convenience they become slaves to it. Smead’s research led him to find out that an astounding 23% of college students eat fast food daily, and 50% still impressively eat fast food 3 times in a 5-day period. Eating fast food becomes ingrained into our daily routines and becomes a necessity that is hard to go without. Even the fact that most meals at fast food restaurants can be eaten utensil-free has become a time-saving epidemic. Smead states that in the wake of food convenience 20% of American meals are consumed in cars. Consumers are eating out so much that Lauden’s praise for fast food did not take into account the overuse of fast food.
Consumers don’t realize how easy it is to overuse fast food. Studies done by a group of researchers including Joshua Petimar have shown that the average purchase at fast food restaurants contains around an incredible 1500 calories. That’s almost the amount of calories needed in an entire day. Since that’s the case, any consumer who indulges in more than one trip to a fast food restaurant in a day would have exceeded their nutritional needs and overused fast food.
We may not know the logistics for how many calories we exceed, but our society understands that fast food isn’t healthy. In our understanding, we still decide to drive and pick up greasy, tasty, and oversized meals. Lauden’s praise for fast food doesn’t reach far enough to see the creation of fast food’s suffocating presence that forces consumers to bend to its will. We see food restaurants everywhere every day, it’s like a child seeing candy stores all day long in the backseat of a car. Even though we know the consequences of fast food, we don’t end up caring because it has regularly involved itself in the daily routines of each consumer.
The majority of the fault shouldn’t be suddenly dropped on the customer for seeking out cheap, fast options in the fast-moving world we live in. Fast food is a wealthy business, and they have the means of support and advertising that help drag customers in. One example would be government subsidies. And “An unHappy Meal: how government spending forced reliance on fast food” by Olivia Olson explains how America has the resources and such to help combat obesity but instead gives money for producing processed foods and to the franchises to provide job stability for the low-income areas.
Our government subsidizes cheap food and we gorge on oversized portions long after our nutrition needs are met. Olson also states that the majority of government subsidies go towards crops that are connected to processed foods, leaving fresh fruits and vegetables more expensive. And on the other hand, the subsidies going towards the franchises to help job stability promote obesity in low-income areas. Though the government is trying to help these areas, the increase in fast food led low-income areas to an increase in obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.
The fast food industry has created an ingenious business. Obviously, the business is at no fault for harming anyone since they are just selling food. Food that tastes just as good as Lauden described compared to the time before processed food. Meals filled with sugar, fats, and calories. Some would say fast food is addicting. David Benton would agree to say that sugar and sweetness in foods create an addiction. In his journal article, “The plausibility of sugar addiction and its role in obesity and eating disorders,” Benton explains that the consumption of sugar-filled foods will induce a chain reaction that entices consumers to go back for more. His research led him to realize that individual ingredients like sugar don’t create an addiction, but that palatability plays the largest role in keeping customers interested. A common example of this would be children and candy, but little do we realize, we are the children and fast food is the candy.
Despite the many wonders, fast food has brought to society, it is a trap. Once we get hooked on the fast food trap, we hurl towards an unhealthy cycle. The food industry has thousands of restaurants surrounding society which lays the foundation for their empire. Customers will succumb to the norm of eating fast food and obesity rates will continue to rise unless fast food gets humbled.
References
Benton, David. “The plausibility of sugar addiction and its role in obesity and eating disorders, Clinical Nutrition,” Volume 29, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 288-303, ISSN 0261-5614.
Laudan, Rachael. “In Praise of Fast Food.” My.northland.edu, University of California Press, Feb. 2010.
Olson, Olivia. “An Unhappy Meal: How Government Spending Forced Reliance on Fast Food.” Bedrosian Center, USC Bedrosian Center, 18 Dec. 2018.
Petimar, Joshua, et al. “Changes in the Calorie and Nutrient Content of Purchased Fast Food Meals after Calorie Menu Labeling: A Natural Experiment.”PLOS Medicine, Public Library of Science, 12 July 2021.
Smead, Spencer. “America’s Fast Food Obsession – Global Food, Health, and Society.” Web.colby.edu, 29 Oct. 2008.
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Counterintuitive Fall 2022 
Finding a rebuttal argument for the social cost of fast food, in general, was tough for me. I used plant-based food and electric cars to help combat the idea that anything that reduces pollution and health still does not negate the reason a social cost can be beneficial. I don’t know if it was too far-fetched but I would like to hear if it was effective or not and how I can improve.
I’m working on some solutions to that dilemma for you now, just before our scheduled Zoom, Mocha.
Here’s what I’ve been searching:
1) A simple “non Scholar” Google search for “in praise of fast food” yielded a remarkable document.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22in+praise+of+fast+food%22&oq=%22in+praise+of+fast+food%22&aqs=chrome..69i57j0i512l3j0i22i30l3.5528j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
A big chunk of Rachal Laudan’s “In Praise of Fast Food” should be very helpful.
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://my.northland.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/11/In-Praise-of-Fast-Food.pdf
2) Then a Google Scholar search for: “feeding the world”
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C31&q=%22feeding+the+world%22&btnG=
“The Challenge of Feeding the World” looks promising, along with 22,000 other sources.
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/20/5816
We’ll talk about them soon.
Here is the new version of the rebuttal argument. I feel like it’s a little vague in the evidence but still argues well against the article praising fast food. Just a little general feedback would be nice, just to know if it is terrible or not.
It’s a good first draft, Mocha, but it needs both better organization and clearer claims.
You wander back and forth between acknowledging the benefits of fast food (which are many) and the costs. And it’s not always clear which you’re claiming.
Fast Food has invented a new era. The introduction of fast food into our lives is discussed in the article “In Praise of Fast Food” by Rachael Laudan who asserts fast food’s convenience has improved our diets, lifestyles, and love for food, allowing more time for women to get jobs, and more. Laudan explains that fast food or processed food has put an end to the old days of women slaving away in the kitchen to make food from scratch, food perishing in the blink of an eye, miserable tasting food, and malnourishment.
—Several generations of social pendulum swings are condensed into one paragraph. If you can pull it off, it’s wonderful. But it’s a lot to ask. Let Laudan drive the conversation halfway. She wants us to remember a time when women spent half their lives shopping for fresh ingredients, preparing meals from scratch at home, and having to plan leftovers carefully to avoid spoilage and waste. Compared to that, fast and processed foods are miracles: eliminating spoilage and food contamination, reducing prep time to almost nothing, and liberating “housewives” to pursue careers. That comparison is enough for a first paragraph. Let it sink in for awhile.
Getting food before and after the invention of fast food is light and day. Instead of spending hours in the kitchen, we can go get a meal served to us well below 25 minutes, maybe more. Now people can reliably go to a fast food restaurant whenever they get hungry and get as much food as they want for a low cost. We can get food through a window, we don’t even need to get out of our cars.
—Additional benefits of fast food. We don’t have to return home several times a day for nourishment. It’s cheap. We remain productive instead of devoting all our time and energy to feeding ourselves.
With all its benefits, we are not to blame for coming to depend on processed and fast food. Our government promotes the low prices with massive subsidies. The businesses it has spawned are located at virtually every highway intersection. We’re bombarded with messages that we can “have it our way.”
Your transition from that message to the rebuttal position is unclear.
You’re trying to cover nourishment, convenience, a “healthy lifestyle,” the limits of a healthy lifestyle (whatever that means), obesity, convenience and low price, all in two sentences. Then your sentence about social cost flops.
Nobody but me will have any idea what that means. In some fashion, you mean that fast food should be priced to reflect its actual “social cost.” But “implementing a social cost” will mean that to no one. “Pay for their future externalities” is another very mysterious phrase I can only guess at.
The concepts are pretty simple. Your claims should be also.
For the rest of the essay, you have good material. You might benefit from a slight shift in emphasis: We know better. We’re not fools. We recognize the food we’re eating is not really fresh, or recognizable as belonging to any particular food group, or healthy. We don’t brag about “dining” at McDonalds every day. We say, “I admit, I eat a lot of fast food: my job, my schedule, my budget.” But we do it. They got us. They addicted us to the drive-thru convenience and low cost.
We’re SO addicted we’ll stay in a line 20 cars long for the “convenience” of a drive-thru when there’s no line inside and we could be served and gone in minutes.
We even let them order for us. Rather than choose individual menu items, we’ll succumb to the added “convenience” of a meal-by-number that is cheaper than the individual components but may include items we would never have ordered, with all their additional empty calories.
Etc.
Helpful?
This feedback is very helpful and I’ll be making revisions soon.