kartooner

I’ve been read­ing Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, an in-depth exam­i­na­tion of the his­tory and dark side of the fast food empire. Scholosser’s research reveals gritty details includ­ing how a great per­cent­age of rob­beries take place in fast food estab­lish­ments and the perps are usu­ally employ­ees. It also reveals the hid­den agenda of these multi-billion dol­lar empires, focus­ing on their bleak adver­tis­ing cam­paigns directed towards chil­dren and the amount of chem­i­cal fla­vor­ings and tin­ker­ings that make a Spicy Chicken sand­wich taste spicy.

One such chap­ter deals with what is called the “white flight”, wherein a good por­tion of a pre­dom­i­nately white pop­u­la­tion will flee an over­pop­u­lated area and move to more rural or west­ern plains. Despite this escape, they usu­ally end up in small towns which are quaint and slow-paced but are over­run by Burger Kings, KFC and Taco Bells.

I’ll have to admit that Fast Food Nation has really opened my eyes to the true agen­das of these cor­po­ra­tions who orig­i­nally began with such hum­ble begin­nings. Their goals were quite dif­fer­ent in the mid-50s to late 60s when most of these estab­lish­ments were formed as a loca­tion con­vien­ance to the (at that time) freshly built free­ways and highways.

Today, how­ever, it’s evi­dent that money is what dri­ves these cor­po­ra­tions and heard­ing as much peo­ple into fast food restau­rants means expand­ing their egos and fill­ing their pock­ets. It’s inter­est­ing that a gal­lon of Coke syrup costs around $4.25. Add water and sev­eral bags of sugar and you begin to see why fast food joints allow con­sumers to have free refills.

As for me, I’m com­pletely con­tent with smaller Mom and Pop joints where the food might take 10–15 min­utes to make but tastes all the bet­ter. It’s home cook­ing that makes my taste­buds siz­zle and not the grease that sat­u­rates the wrap­pers of a ham­burger or the chewy fries that sat under the heaters for the past sev­eral hours.