Society Today-Fast Food

A review of fast food.

2011. The era of iPods, 3-dimensional gaming systems, and face-to-face phone calls. It seems so perfect from the outside, why change it?

Because we've turned America into an oversized machine full of hate.

In the book Chew On This (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson  explain the evolution of fast food from the first drive-ins to plans for the future. It also includes how meat is processed, the treatment of workers, and the side effects of fast food.

A movie also related is America, Inc, which is also about fast food. However, it focuses on the modern-day industry, and it also includes food of all type. Both hit on alternatives to Big macs and Coca-Cola.

We all know what obesity is. It is linked to fast food, for obvious reasons. However, the CEOs of processed food companies could care less. If they get money, they're happy.

Let's take a look at how fast food is made, from day-old chicks to the McNugget on the table, in front of you.

Imagine you are a farmer, looking for a profitable crop. People like chicken, right? So why not help out and raise chickens for Burger King or some other global chain? You sign up, and you get the hen houses. Steel houses with feed bins and nesting areas. Then the crops come: day-old chicks, still fluffed out. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them go into your hen-houses. The company tells you to just feed them once a day, and if any die, to remove them. Seems easy money, right?

Six weeks later, you realize that these chicks are full-grown. They have large breasts and thighs, right where the meat is. This is because you're raising mcchickens, a bird bred for a large amount of meat in a short amount of time. The way they live, the only see daylight the first day of their life and the last day.

They take the chickens that have survived the six-week prison, put them into crates, load the crates into a truck, and drive off. You get a check, depending on the quality and quantity of the birds. Then, you start all over.

After the birds leave the 'farms', they are taken to a slaughterhouse/factory. They are moved from truck to conveyor belt, where workers, many of which are illegal immigrants and are paid minimum wage without benefits, open the crates and lock the chickens, upside-down, into shackles attached to yet another conveyor belt. They hang there, until they are dipped into a large vat of water, made to knock them out. This doesn't always work, however. A handful will come out, flailing wildly.

The next step is a series of rotating blades, whose purpose is to decapitate the chicken. This can also fail, as the chicken can easily swing its head up, safely away from the blades. The last step in preparing the chicken, however, leads to an inevitable death for any bird on the belt. A vat of boiling water will not only kill any chicken who survived the blades, but it removes all feathers with ease. From there, the chicken is sliced apart, unnecessary entrails tossed aside. They are then shredded, formed into shapes with a fat-based glue, breaded, frozen, and shipped to local fast-food joints across the world.

Beef, however, has a different approach. Because of the variation in weights of cows, most of the work is done by hand. The cows and steer are raised on either dairy or beef farms. Dairy farm sell the cows after their milk production starts to fall. beef farms sell the cattle when they have the most amount of meat available for slaughter.

The ramps leading to the slaughterhouses are often curved and gently sloped, not letting the animal see what's ahead. Then, the animal is killed by decapitation, usually using a blade similar to a scythe. The animal is then put onto a large hook, which moves around the factory. Workers with knives reach up, pull down a slab of meat, cut it, then put it on a belt. This is done in rapid succession, to increase productivity. This can lead to accidents in the workplace. A gruesome list of injuries from slaughterhouses go as follows: burned by saw fuel, laceration from flying blade, finger removed in sausage extruder, finger removed in chitlin machine, fingers removed by guillotine blade, fingers removed in meat blender, eye injured with meat hook, arm removed in meat grinder, burned in tallow fire, burned by hot solution, dead/injured by ammonia spill, killed by meat grinder, head crushed by conveyor, crushed by hide fleshing machine, killed by stun gun, and killed by gut-cooker machine.

That hamburger you just loaded with tons of lettuce, tomatoes, and ketchup also contains meat from thousands of cows. The chicken nuggets your little siblings love are held together by fat. They don't tell the public this, though. If they knew, they might refuse to eat there, which will lower sales for sure.

So next time your parents ask you what you want for dinner, think about it, before you blurt out the name of a corporate chain. You never know what's in the food.

Reviews

[Tasha]

Wow, i remember watching a video in middle school about how McDonalds gets their chicken nuggets, and after seeing that i vowed to never eat chicken nuggets from there again, and that's been 4 years. its a shame that to get so much of the food we eat from fast food restaurants, we never stop to think about these poor animals that never get the chance to see the sun except for when they get there and when they die. more people need to realize where fast food really comes from, and they need to make more videos so more people can become educated. thank you so much for this Lu.

~ ♥ Ta'Shandra