On fast food

Lately, most fast food is neither fast nor food. Certainly, fast food covers the major food groups–fat, sugar, salt and caffeine, but isn’t there more to life than just choking down a burger and fries with a sugary, caffeinated drink? Sometimes I wonder if fast food joints aren’t a sign of the time poverty that both lowers our standards and robs us of life? I don’t mean to pick on these well-meaning businesses that serve us burgers, fries, chicken, fish, tacos, pizza, burritos and sandwiches, but we seem to be sacrificing a lot more than our basic nutrition by frequenting these places. Perhaps fast food is a weird oxymoron that invalidates the real meaning of breakfast, lunch and dinner. Perhaps none of these meals was every meant to be inhaled in some linoleum clad anti-aesthetic eating factory. For lunch today I sat with a retired colleague and we talked while we ate and neither he nor I was in any hurry. The food was all freshly made that day, including the chili which was really quite tasty. We took our time. None of our food came wrapped in anything. No ketchup, no fries, no cheese–why do they have to put that creepy orange cheese on everything?. Do we lose track of our souls when we submit them to a regime of fast anonymous food? Perhaps a family should spend time eating together–it certainly couldn’t hurt. I don’t really dislike the foods served in fast food joints–lots of salt, lots of fat, what’s not to like? But neither the empty calories nor the anonymous atmosphere of that food and those places can help with digestion. Eating for human beings is much more than just eating. Our gregarious nature leads us to share food in groups. Major religions have festivals in which a common meal is obligatory, often imbued with deep religious and spiritual significance. Fast food robs significance from the experience of eating. Once in awhile fast food might solve a momentary problem of eating when time is not on your side, but I would suggest that perhaps we all need to take a good long look at ourselves if this happens frequently. Fast food is bad not because it’s food, but because it’s fast. The burger and fries are not bad because they come in paper containers, but they are bad because we consume them with little or no expectation of doing little more than just filling our stomachs. That’s bad.