The Pros and Cons of Fast FoodPros: Schools have the ability to get more money if they advertise a product, which means better education for students. Fast food is cheap Fast food is, well, fast It will soon awaken people to its horrors.Cons: Often the leaders of huge, influential corporations lead the public to believe that they are wonderful (such as Walt Disney) The corporations do not care about the environment, they chop down the trees and bulldoze animals habitats so they can make money. Also, the wastes are not properly disposed of or recycled. They are left to literally rot and pollute the land. They get customers to buy their food by hiding their true intentions behind a healthy competition, such as Pizza Huts reading competition. McDonalds lets businessmen spy on their customers using equipment used in the Cold War. All the food begins frozen in the actual restaurants. Some chains dont let employees stay on if they do not submit to a lie-detector test about unions and their activities. They make so much money that they are a prime place to rob, and the robbers often kill the innocent workers there. Small, honest, family run restaurants are often run out of business by the greedy chains. This also includes family ranchers and farmers. Causes people to feel the need to diet 90% of all fries (and therefore potatoes) are bought in fast food restaurants Between the 2 million farmers and ranchers and the 275 million consumers, there are roughly a dozen of multi-billionaire corporations. The food served at fast food restaurants is not made there, but instead made miles and miles away from the chains. The flavorings and colorings in fast food are all just chemicals, nothing truly natural is often used, and more often than not the artificial flavoring is healthier than the natural flavoring. The Food and Drug Administration does not require that the flavor companies write out the long list of ingredients, as long as the chemical is considered to be GRAS (Generally Regarded As Safe). There are often 50 or more chemicals added to one flavor. The fast food restaurant manufacturing companies often mistreat the land. The chicken McNuggets from McDonalds consist of tiny pieces of reconstructed white meat chicken held all together by stabilizers. The flavorings added to meat often contain twice as much fat than the original meat source. The giant manufacturers and slaughterhouses are stressing true, real families that are ranchers or farmers and their suicide rate is roughly three times higher than the national average. Slaughterhouses and meat packing houses push to make money and sell to fast food chains creates the most dangerous jobs in the world with the highest injury rate, but most of it goes unreported and untreated. Companies cheat and add temporary additives (like adding water to grain to make it weigh heavier on the scale, a strategy used by ConAgra) to make their product worth more, and therefore cheat off buyers. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) does not impose consequential fines. National Beef was fined only $480 for each persons death. Chains do not reveal that there are deadly pathogens in the meat until the majority of it is mostly eaten. There is literally shit in the meat. One hamburger from fast food not has meat anywhere from dozens to hundreds of different cattle. The advertisements for fast food are now recognizable to nearly all children. (i.e. Ronald McDonald in Beijing). The chains are so impatient and want to open new restaurants everywhere, and they impede on historically important land. (McDonalds on the Dachau camp) Chains work with reporters to make sure the chains get the best possible publicity, and make sure the reporters dont reveal their secrets that could cause them to go out of business. 95% of the ads aimed at children promote them to eat sugary, fattening, and salty foods, from a survey on childrens advertising in the European Union. McDonalds ran the most commercials in that 95%. Some countries and groups are now so against and opposed to fast food that they are bombing the restaurants and killing the workers there. The number of advertisements aimed at children steadily increases to this day. Roughly 2/3 of the adults in America are overweight and obese.

While fast food is steadily growing throughout the country and more and more restaurants are being opened every day, the negative effects of fast food are slowly becoming visible. While there are a few benefits of fast food, such as more money for schools if they advertise a product, fast food and junk food just simply is not as great as it was once believed to be. The environment is being harmed, the quality of food is decreasing, and the giant corporations are taking down family businesses that have existed for decades. The fast food industry is rapidly taking over, and people, Americans especially, need to wake up and smell the coffeeor the grease.The first main problem with the fast food industry is their lack of care for the environment from which their success (their food) originally comes from. A city in Colorado, Greeley, has a slaughter house, and the smell permeates the land surrounding it for miles. According to Schlosser, The smell is hard to forget but not easy to describe, a combination of live animals, manure, and dead animals being rendered into dog food (149). Having been to Greeley myself, I can testify that the smell is truly as awful as is described, and I was only on the outskirts. Because of the high demand for meat in fast food restaurants, slaughterhouses must work faster. Because of competition between different slaughterhouse companies, the slaughterhouses must work faster than faster. And from this high demand from the restaurants, the slaughterhouses have an extremely high demand for cattle. The companies cram feedlots with cattle like sardines in a can. All the cattle must make use of their digestive system however, and the companies are too cheap to dispose of the animals waste correctly. Therefore lagoons exist, which are huge pools of excrement (150). To begin righting the horrifying effects the fast food industry left behind, the industry needs to learn to take better care of the environment.Nearly all chains use additives in their foods to give them a distinct flavor that you cant get anywhere else, even if you make it yourself. McDonalds fries are the worst when it comes to their additives in their fries. McDonalds used to use their notable oil (93 percent beef tallow and 7 percent cottonseed oil) to fry their fries in, which contained more saturated beef fat per ounce than a McDonalds hamburger (120). Restaurants should instead try to make healthy food choices on their menus, instead of not-beef items that have more beef than the beef itself. In addition, natural flavor additives are not even natural. In fact, Terry Acree quoted by Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation, A natural flavor, says Terry Acree, a professor of food science technology at Cornell University, is a flavor thats been derived with an out-of-date technology (126). Labels need to start telling people what is really in the products they are buying, such as the realization that natural flavors are really just artificial flavors claiming to be natural so that the companies can rip of consumers and get money. Schlosser states that Calling any of these flavors natural requires a flexible attitude toward the English language and a fair amount of irony (127). To avoid these issues, all food producers must start using organic materials and put the 100% truth on their labels, not rounding anything in the process of writing the label to simply make it sound better and convince people to spend money on a frauds products.The last huge key problem with the fast food industry is their fierce competitiveness, and their race to sell as much as possible as cheaply as possible. Before there were only the meat packing giants, the family owned meatpackers would throw out much of the animal, only using the prime cuts of meat. Today, companies do their best of squeezing every millimeter of meat off the bones, including other undesirable meat parts, and mashing it together, and a single fast food hamburger now contains meat from dozens or even hundreds of different cattle (204). To make matters worse, the US government cannot order meatpacking companies to recall deathly meat filled with pathogens. These pathogens (such as E coli) that are from a single animal can easily pass throughout all of them, mostly by their waste. As stated in Fast Food Nation, there lies a simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill: There is shit in the meat (197). But then, to make their products last longer, they freeze them and ship them off to fast food restaurants, so the restaurants can heat them up in microwaves and fryers. Both the contaminated meats and the safe meats are loaded onto the same truck to be shipped, and soon there is an entire truckload full of poisonous meat. In addition to the frozen meat for easy transport and easy cooking in the kitchens at fast food restaurants, the chains order the rest of their food frozen as well. So then they have the frozen bacon, the frozen pancakes, and the frozen cinnamon rolls and the frozen hash browns, the frozen biscuits, the frozen McMuffins (68). Todays technology enables the food to be delivered faster than ever before, all because the only thing employees have to do is unfreeze the food and keep it warm until someone orders it. The quality of meat has seriously declined since the invention of fast food and the severe competition to be the cheapest, fastest, most money-making chain in the country, and throughout the world.In order to alleviate all these problems, the first thing that needs to happen is for people to learn what is actually happening behind the neon signs, smiling commercials and ads, and the cheerful logos. Once people learn about the truth, then really the only thing left to do is boycotting, speeches, convincing the government to create stricter laws on the fast food chains, and all the rest will snowball and fall into place. If the fast food giants are not taken down, the already large population of obese Americans will skyrocket, children will be brainwashed into thinking that fattening foods are healthy and healthy foods are fattening. The gigantic corporations must be controlled unless America wants to be a roly-poly country, and roll to move around, similar to how the chains rolled over all the attempts that people made to try to fix them previously.