You Are What You Eat

7 Pages 1777 Words

The Rituals of Fast Food

In a world where technology advances exponentially and the old-fashioned way of life decreases day by day, even food is treated as mass produced merchandise aimed to serve ¡°billions and billions¡± daily. In taverns, diners and restaurants, people used to sit down, have a conversation while waiting for the food to be served, and take their time with their food. Now, it seems as if no one has time to eat or even bothers to make any time to eat, and from sitting and dining at the usual restaurant, everything has changed to being ¡°carry-out,¡± ¡°delivery,¡± or ¡°on the go.¡± The phrase, ¡°You are what you eat,¡± is very true; Fast food restaurants are reflections of the fast-paced lifestyles people are living in the present time.
There is nothing wrong with corporations of fast food chains itself, they only provide what the consumers in general want. What do the consumers want? As Ms. Margaret Visser writes, ¡°the safely predictable, the convenient, the fast and ordinary.¡± She suggests that people who are on the road, or in a hurry do not want to deal with the hassle of worrying if a meal will taste the same or different. Why wait an eternity for food to be made when they can get a meal they know will satisfy them less than a third of the time than that of a restaurant meal? Only a fast food restaurant can produce meals with such precision and deliver it to a customer base so large. People know what they are getting when they go to a fast food restaurant, and they get what they want every time.
Familiarity is key in the restaurant business. Sports bars fill their walls with hockey jerseys, and other sports paraphernalia, most of the time jerseys of local teams. Restaurants cover walls with a set theme of some sort, whether it be a rain forest, Asian art, or familiar American icons. The reason why any restaurant or food establishment has any regular customers is for...