The Pros and Cons of Fast Food

Pros:

All the food begins frozen in the actual

Schools have the ability to get more

restaurants.
Some chains dont let employees stay on if

money if they advertise a product, which

they do not submit to a lie-detector test

means better education for students.

Fast food is cheap
Fast food is, well, fast
It will soon awaken people to its horrors.

about unions and their activities.

They make so much money that they are a

Cons:

prime place to rob, and the robbers often

often run out of business by the greedy

Often the leaders of huge, influential

chains. This also includes family ranchers

corporations lead the public to believe that

they are wonderful (such as Walt Disney)

The corporations do not care about the

and farmers.
Causes people to feel the need to diet
90% of all fries (and therefore potatoes)

are bought in fast food restaurants

Between the 2 million farmers and

environment, they chop down the trees and

bulldoze animals habitats so they can

make money. Also, the wastes are not

ranchers and the 275 million consumers,

properly disposed of or recycled. They are

there are roughly a dozen of multi-

left to literally rot and pollute the land.

They get customers to buy their food by

billionaire corporations.
The food served at fast food restaurants is

not made there, but instead made miles

hiding their true intentions behind a

healthy competition, such as Pizza Huts

kill the innocent workers there.

Small, honest, family run restaurants are

and miles away from the chains.

The flavorings and colorings in fast food

reading competition.
McDonalds lets businessmen spy on their

are all just chemicals, nothing truly natural

customers using equipment used in the

is often used, and more often than not the

Cold War.

artificial flavoring is healthier than the

natural flavoring.

The Food and Drug Administration does

highest injury rate, but most of it goes

not require that the flavor companies write

unreported and untreated.

Companies cheat and add temporary

out the long list of ingredients, as long as

additives (like adding water to grain to
the chemical is considered to be GRAS
make it weigh heavier on the scale, a

(Generally Regarded As Safe).

There are often 50 or more chemicals

added to one flavor.

The fast food restaurant manufacturing

companies often mistreat the land.

The chicken McNuggets from McDonalds

strategy used by ConAgra) to make their

product worth more, and therefore cheat

Administration (OSHA) does not impose

consist of tiny pieces of reconstructed

consequential fines. National Beef was

white meat chicken held all together by

stabilizers.
The flavorings added to meat often contain

it is mostly eaten.
There is literally shit in the meat.
One hamburger from fast food not has
meat anywhere from dozens to hundreds

slaughterhouses are stressing true, real

families that are ranchers or farmers and

fined only $480 for each persons death.

Chains do not reveal that there are deadly
pathogens in the meat until the majority of

twice as much fat than the original meat

source.
The giant manufacturers and

off buyers.
The Occupational Safety and Health

of different cattle.
The advertisements for fast food are now

their suicide rate is roughly three times

recognizable to nearly all children. (i.e.

higher than the national average.

Slaughterhouses and meat packing

Ronald McDonald in Beijing).

The chains are so impatient and want to

houses push to make money and sell to

open new restaurants everywhere, and
fast food chains creates the most
they impede on historically important
dangerous jobs in the world with the
land. (McDonalds on the Dachau camp)

Chains work with reporters to make sure

McDonalds ran the most commercials in

the chains get the best possible publicity,

that 95%.
Some countries and groups are now so

and make sure the reporters dont reveal

against and opposed to fast food that they
their secrets that could cause them to go
are bombing the restaurants and killing the

out of business.
95% of the ads aimed at children promote

workers there.
The number of advertisements aimed at

children steadily increases to this day.

Roughly 2/3 of the adults in America are

them to eat sugary, fattening, and salty

foods, from a survey on childrens
advertising in the European Union.

overweight and obese.

While fast food is steadily growing throughout the country and more and more
restaurants are being opened every day, the negative effects of fast food are slowly becoming
visible. While there are a few benefits of fast food, such as more money for schools if they
advertise a product, fast food and junk food just simply is not as great as it was once believed to
be. The environment is being harmed, the quality of food is decreasing, and the giant
corporations are taking down family businesses that have existed for decades. The fast food
industry is rapidly taking over, and people, Americans especially, need to wake up and smell the
coffeeor the grease.
The first main problem with the fast food industry is their lack of care for the
environment from which their success (their food) originally comes from. A city in Colorado,
Greeley, has a slaughter house, and the smell permeates the land surrounding it for miles.
According to Schlosser, The smell is hard to forget but not easy to describe, a combination of

live animals, manure, and dead animals being rendered into dog food (149). Having been to
Greeley myself, I can testify that the smell is truly as awful as is described, and I was only on the
outskirts. Because of the high demand for meat in fast food restaurants, slaughterhouses must
work faster. Because of competition between different slaughterhouse companies, the
slaughterhouses must work faster than faster. And from this high demand from the restaurants,
the slaughterhouses have an extremely high demand for cattle. The companies cram feedlots with
cattle like sardines in a can. All the cattle must make use of their digestive system however, and
the companies are too cheap to dispose of the animals waste correctly. Therefore lagoons exist,
which are huge pools of excrement (150). To begin righting the horrifying effects the fast food
industry left behind, the industry needs to learn to take better care of the environment.
Nearly all chains use additives in their foods to give them a distinct flavor that you cant
get anywhere else, even if you make it yourself. McDonalds fries are the worst when it comes to
their additives in their fries. McDonalds used to use their notable oil (93 percent beef tallow and
7 percent cottonseed oil) to fry their fries in, which contained more saturated beef fat per ounce
than a McDonalds hamburger (120). Restaurants should instead try to make healthy food
choices on their menus, instead of not-beef items that have more beef than the beef itself. In
addition, natural flavor additives are not even natural. In fact, Terry Acree quoted by Eric
Schlosser in Fast Food Nation, A natural flavor, says Terry Acree, a professor of food science
technology at Cornell University, is a flavor thats been derived with an out-of-date
technology (126). Labels need to start telling people what is really in the products they are
buying, such as the realization that natural flavors are really just artificial flavors claiming to
be natural so that the companies can rip of consumers and get money. Schlosser states that
Calling any of these flavors natural requires a flexible attitude toward the English language

and a fair amount of irony (127). To avoid these issues, all food producers must start using
organic materials and put the 100% truth on their labels, not rounding anything in the process
of writing the label to simply make it sound better and convince people to spend money on a
frauds products.
The last huge key problem with the fast food industry is their fierce competitiveness, and
their race to sell as much as possible as cheaply as possible. Before there were only the meat
packing giants, the family owned meatpackers would throw out much of the animal, only using
the prime cuts of meat. Today, companies do their best of squeezing every millimeter of meat off
the bones, including other undesirable meat parts, and mashing it together, and a single fast
food hamburger now contains meat from dozens or even hundreds of different cattle (204). To
make matters worse, the US government cannot order meatpacking companies to recall deathly
meat filled with pathogens. These pathogens (such as E coli) that are from a single animal can
easily pass throughout all of them, mostly by their waste. As stated in Fast Food Nation, there
lies a simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill: There is
shit in the meat (197). But then, to make their products last longer, they freeze them and ship
them off to fast food restaurants, so the restaurants can heat them up in microwaves and fryers.
Both the contaminated meats and the safe meats are loaded onto the same truck to be shipped,
and soon there is an entire truckload full of poisonous meat. In addition to the frozen meat for
easy transport and easy cooking in the kitchens at fast food restaurants, the chains order the rest
of their food frozen as well. So then they have the frozen bacon, the frozen pancakes, and the
frozen cinnamon rolls and the frozen hash browns, the frozen biscuits, the frozen McMuffins
(68). Todays technology enables the food to be delivered faster than ever before, all because the
only thing employees have to do is unfreeze the food and keep it warm until someone orders it.

The quality of meat has seriously declined since the invention of fast food and the severe
competition to be the cheapest, fastest, most money-making chain in the country, and throughout
the world.
In order to alleviate all these problems, the first thing that needs to happen is for people to
learn what is actually happening behind the neon signs, smiling commercials and ads, and the
cheerful logos. Once people learn about the truth, then really the only thing left to do is
boycotting, speeches, convincing the government to create stricter laws on the fast food chains,
and all the rest will snowball and fall into place. If the fast food giants are not taken down, the
already large population of obese Americans will skyrocket, children will be brainwashed into
thinking that fattening foods are healthy and healthy foods are fattening. The gigantic
corporations must be controlled unless America wants to be a roly-poly country, and roll to move
around, similar to how the chains rolled over all the attempts that people made to try to fix them
previously.