Bryan Lee
San Francisco State University
The fast food industry has come a long way from its humble beginnings nearly a century ago. The first restaurant considered a fast food restaurant was called White Castle. White Castle was opened in 1921 in Wichita, Kansas by Billy Ingram. He opened it so that he could sell his slider-style burgers at a price of 5 cents per patty. White castle is in business today and its belief of selling cheap affordable food for all became the foundation for all the fast food places that were founded soon after. Places that include, Kentucky Fried Chicken in 1930, McDonalds in 1940, In-n-Out in 1948, Burger King in 1954, and Wendy’s in 1969 along with others became the well known cheap eateries that we have here today. All this fast food although cheap, they have clearly had a well documented negative effects of it as well. As more and more fast food appears and gets advertised in our lives it drives people to want to go and get some but causes the average weight of people to go up because of it and also leads to the fast food industry to make money off of it too. The fast food industry has its goods and consequences but ultimately it comes down to what position you are looking at the industry from to really identify your viewpoint. For example if you were a person looking for a job and all you could get was a job at McDonalds, you would think that the industry is good because you make money off of it. But if you were a person who has become obese as a result of eating too much fast food, you might not be a big fan of the fast food industry. There are many arguments that can be made for the fast food industry because of all the good that it provides to people. The first benefit that it has is that it provides cheap food to people since back when it first started it cost 5 cents at White Castle per burger and nowadays basically every