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Essay / A hamburger with a side of lying
When my parents were young, there were no walls full of food in every store, there were no junk food vending machines at work or in schools, gas stations were not places where people ate full meals. Fast food places would not sell breakfast if they remained open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Today, access to unhealthy food choices and their aggressive and persistent advertising and marketing campaigns, especially from fast food restaurants, is practically abundant. Fast food restaurants have begun selling larger portions of hamburgers, fries and sodas while avoiding apples and bananas, seeing their greatest economic interest as generating revenue in a toxic food environment. The rapid growth of the fast food industry, with its unreliable marketing and unhealthy approach to the population, generates in our society, especially among Americans, an increase in bad habits and health problems. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original Essay As I said, until a few years ago the amount of junk food offered by stores was almost non-existent. However, nowadays, having a high-calorie snack or a full meal is not that difficult, especially when there is a fast food restaurant almost on every corner. As an example, Santa Clarita has over two hundred restaurants, but almost a quarter of them could be classified as healthy. This may be why more than half of the American population suffers from diet-related health problems, overweight or obesity, but no one can blame them. Since the creation of fast food on a larger scale, the debate around it has always included the unhealthy meals being sold. The high-calorie foods offered by fast food places will make you gain more weight than the foods they prepare at home, but sometimes people can't help but buy food there. One author suggests: “If you're like most young people, you see an average of 21 food ads every day on television. Most of these ads are for foods high in sugar and fat.” Faced with this massive and aggressive advertising which makes junk food appear tasty and appetizing, even if these places offered natural and healthy foods, the majority of children and adolescents will choose the biggest hamburger accompanied by fries and a sugary drink. . Same note, fast food places often use the vague term "all natural" in an attempt to sell "healthier" foods to people who care about what they put in their bodies, but this word used deliberately for purposes marketing remains quite unreliable. Fast food chains use the term without it being heavily regulated, meaning that "all natural" does not always mean that the foods sold to people contain less sodium or less fat, and therefore less unhealthy, because in most cases it's the other way around. This deceptive way of selling “health” to a certain group of people, in the long term, would affect them even more. Lately, more and more people are aware of how the fast food industry works. The people who supply fast food chains are not taking environmental or even healthy approaches to growing the foods used in our meals, especiallymeat, which does not come from a farm but from a factory where, according to some reports, animals and workers suffer abuse. The big fast food chains want a huge amount of food that has to be almost identical, which literally means all the birds are exactly the same size, and if they are grown quickly the factories and obviously the fast food chains win more money. In fact, organizations like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, have called out several fast food chains for failing to treat animals compassionately. Unfortunately, no one has done anything to change this. Last week I saw how animals and workers were treated in the movie Food Inc. and it is infuriating. Even though the evidence is clear and people know the type of abuse that occurs, doing nothing has become one of the fast food industry's methods of interest. No one can blame the workers for treating animals this way, considering they don't want to do this type of work, they just desperately need the money, but people can blame the companies behind it. In fact, eating at fast food chains will always offer consistency, that is, the same taste across the board. In the article A Mickey Mouse Approach to Globalization, Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom states that people have tried McDonald's hamburgers from all over the world and "[T]hey really all taste the same." Nonetheless, mass production of food is definitely not a decent mechanism when it comes to processed foods. The chemicals and preservatives used in the process make it almost impossible to clearly control the quality of foods prepared on a large scale. Because of this, some cases have emerged claiming that fast food establishments have caused massive outbreaks of foodborne illnesses. For example, a few years ago, a family was going on vacation and, because they were hungry, they stopped at the nearest fast food restaurant to eat cheeseburgers. Later, the youngest child in the family began to feel ill. As the family rushed to the hospital, the little child felt worse and worse by the second. Unfortunately, the child died thirteen days later from food poisoning called E. Coli, found in the meat of the cheeseburger the child had eaten a few days before. The unintended consequences caused by the fast food industry, which technically relies on the meat industry, were never addressed, and to this day, the fast food chains that caused this atrocity remain untouched. If the government realized that fast food and unhealthy foods are sending people relying on the American health care system, going to the hospital because of diabetes or other food-borne illnesses and trying to find a way to fix the food industry, they will understand how much money they can save and even make. The goal is simple: not to send people to the hospital. There is an urgent need to find a good way to fix the fast food system, or even the food industry in general. No one is asking the government to permanently close all fast food restaurants, because who doesn't like a burger with a side? fries from time to time, or even once a week. As Michelle Obama says in the article Remarks of First Lady Michelle Obama as Prepared for Delivery Let's Move Launch "Our children are not choosing to make food products with tons of sugar and sodium...and market those products everywhere they se,.