Summary Of In Praise Of Fast Food

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Rachel Lauden’s essay In Praise of Fast Food presents a fresh point of view by taking a look at the way the poor fed themselves throughout history and comparing it with the reality of today’s fast food industry. The current thinking about fast food is that it is unhealthy and leads to diabetes, heart disease, and obesity, when it is eaten without moderation.
The argument Ms. Lauden proposes is that, due to the difficulties in procuring and preparing healthy, sanitary food for the lower classes, fast food is a positive development. She pointed out that as recently as the 1930s, poor children were cooking for themselves in outdoor shanties in extremely unsanitary conditions, and she emphasized the idea that upper classes invented ethnic dishes.
Before the advent of penicillin, in 1930, infant mortality was common. Without access to birth control and health education, poor couples often bore more children than they could adequately feed. In contrast, modern families are far more educated about birth control, sanitation methods, and have access to health care and antibiotics, even if it is only acquired at the emergency room. With better living conditions and a greater sense of personal security, the population exploded, and the availability of fast food has permitted people to consume high-calorie, nutrition-poor food to the exclusion of almost anything else. But this is only the beginning of this systemic issue.
Not only are today’s families far less active, but easy access to rich-tasting, cheap food can be addictive. The fast food industry knows this and uses this information to make foods which make the brain crave more. In his book Salt Sugar Fat, author Michael Moss discussed this in an interview with food scientist Steve Witherly.
“He ticked off a dozen attributes of the Cheetos that make the brain say more. But the one he focused on most was the puff’s uncanny ability to melt in the mouth. “It’s called vanishing caloric density,” Witherly said. “If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s no calories in it . . . you can just keep eating it

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