Fast Food as a Kid

Fast Food

As a kid my mother was very health conscious. We were not allowed to eat chips, sugary cereals or soda with sugar. To go to McDonald's was a huge deal in my family and it was something that happened very rarely, but when it did happen, it was a completely different experience from how things are today in the fast food world. For example, as a kid I remember the proportions being much smaller. I remember a regular hamburger and fries were what is now the size of a kid's meal -- perhaps smaller. It was enough food to fill you up and not wreak havoc on one's waistline. When my parents divorced my dad pretty much became a bachelor again with full bachelor mentality. When we stayed with him he would give me and my sister money and we would go to McDonald's or Burger King to get food and we would literally pig out on Big Macs and Large Fries. My mom said that we were visibly fatter when we would come home from a long stay with my father. Fast food somehow became something u-special, something that was more for gluttons than for people who wanted a quick and healthy (and convenient meal).

Pollan has a very intelligent and informed opinion about fast food in this country. He notes that there are now better practices when it comes to slaughtering animals for fast food and McDonald's has stopped using genetically modified potatoes, but there are still major problems in their industry. The fact that a hamburger can have the number of calories that one should eat in an entire day is ridiculous. They tout healthy options such as salads, however, many of their salads have more calories than a regular burger.

I had a friend who worked for McDonald's in high school and (this is a true story) she stole a bag of lettuce from work (for what reason I have no idea, either I have just forgotten or chosen consciously to forget). She put it in the trunk of her car (this was in summer) and forgot about it essentially. She opened her trunk about 10 days later and the lettuce was still there in its plastic bag -- not even wilted, not even brown. It was essentially the exact same color and texture as when she put it in there. I am not a farmer or a lettuce specialist, but it seems that lettuce should start to rot in a stuffy trunk in the dead of summer.

Pollen brings up so many important issues when it comes to fast food and he essentially combines school food into that category of fast food because it is, for the most part, not the best meat or vegetables, and it is cheap moreover. School lunches have come to represent not healthy and balanced meals for growing children but fattening and unsellable food that nobody else would buy. This is what we are feeding our children who are growing and it is necessary for them to have healthy food. Why are we feeding our children things that we wouldn't even feed our pets?

The bottom line is that Pollan makes a very good point about how we as humans have come to be so separated from the natural world. Animals in the wild don't worry about food like we do (well, they might worry where their next meal is coming from, but they don't have to worry about what kinds of chemicals and strange genetically modified foods they are eating). If we eat "industrially," we are essentially eating corn all the time. It is in everything we eat -- soda, chicken nuggets, even in meat we buy at the store and cook ourselves because it is used to fatten the meat. The idea that we humans are now essentially ridden with corn in our bodies is disturbing. How is this going to effect the human race down the line? Pollan mentions that not only are we made up of corn, but we are also made up of fossil fuels now because corn needs nitrogen and gets it from fertilizer instead of soil. The corn is fed to the cows who then eat grass and get sick so then they are pumped full of antibiotics. A meal at McDonald's -- say, a hamburger, fries, and soda is entirely corn.

Pollan's book, more than anything else, really opens one's eyes to the practices of the food industry. Most of the general public probably is not aware of how much corn they are eating every single day. It is in everything. How does this affect our health? How does it benefit corn growers? What are the repercussions both financially and health-wise? These are all questions that Pollan forces us to ponder.