Fast Food Nation

You walk into a fast food restaurant - let’s say McDonalds for example – and you order yourself a salad. You made the conscious decision on ordering that salad because you wanted to eat something that was considered healthy instead of the order of large fries that were calling your name. In Eric Schlosser’s book, “Fast food nation”, and Mark Bittman’s TED Talk: “What’s wrong with what we eat”, the issue of overeating is brought up and a question arises. We must eat to survive and we enjoy eating food that tastes good, but what happens when the world begins eating too much and we stop cooking just to get that quick cheap meal?
In the excerpt titled, “Why the fries taste good”, the author Eric Schlosser provides a detailed summary of a man named J.R. Simplot and how he made billions off of potatoes, but in his book, “Fast food nation”, – which the excerpt is from – we read about a much bigger picture at hand. The fast food industry has altered America and is fueling the ever growing numbers of obesity, even at this exact moment.
The problems with what we eat are linked to a thousand other problems as well. In a TED talk filmed in December 2007, Mark Bittman1 describes multiple issues with our food industry as a whole. He opens his talk addressing
He spent a fair amount of time – more than two years – researching for his book and he points out that one of the main reasons people buy fast food is because “it has been carefully designed to taste good. It’s also inexpensive and convenient.” (Schlosser 2001). Both journalists believe that with unhealthy food becoming so convenient, people are ditching cooking at home for a quick and cheap meal. Mark Bittman goes into great detail with this and provides us with a look at the