FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Jan 20th, 2013 by haileyrae
Some days I would just kill for a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. McDonalds truly has mastered fast-food perfection; but I haven’t eaten in one of their restaurants for years. After watching just part of ‘Supersize Me’, I was completely put off fast-food. The truth of fast-food restaurants over the years has slowly been revealed, yet the likes of Mcdonalds, Burger King, Wendy’s…are all still wildly successful. Why?
Globally, there are more than 1 billion overweight adults, at least 300 million of them clinically obese. Obesity rates have risen three-fold or more since 1980 in some areas of North America, the United Kingdom, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Pacific Islands, Australasia and China.”1
In the book ‘Fast Food Nation’, Eric Schlosser states that $240 billion are being spent annually on health care costs in the United States.2
Correlation? I think yes.
McDonalds started in the 1940s but experienced incredible growth during the 1970s.3 With more and more people ‘on-the-go’, what better place to snatch a snack in 5 minutes or less than at Mickey D’s? But with so much information out about the importance of healthy eating and the risks of consuming unhealthy ‘Happy Meals’, why are people still eating McDonalds? It couldn’t be the advertising, could it?
It seems I’m only tempted by fast-food chains when I see those juicy commercials on TV. When I actually see a real-life McDonalds burger, it doesn’t look even slightly similar. Recently, McDonalds has created a website ‘telling the truth’. Customers ask the questions, and they answer…truthfully. Here I was able to see the complete process of how the photograph their burgers for commercials. It was disconcerting learning about the time, effort, and money put into making a burger look so good. I didn’t even realize there was a job out there for ‘Food Stylists’.
With the obesity count rising, as well as the cost, it seems to me like McDonalds is bordering on some ethical issues. Dressing up their food, rumors about trick wording such as 100% Beef which is actually just the name of the company, and claiming their salads are healthy when their dressings are chalked full of preservatives and fat, it’s all rather deceitful. With people’s lives at risk and nations’ money being used up when there are so much larger issues to be resolved, why are we still allowing McDonalds to feed us fries…and lies?
Check out McDonalds’ truth
References
1,2http://www.worldometers.info/obesity/
3http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_McDonald%27s
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/03/its-100-percent-beef-company-on-defensive-as-it-closes-plants/