Effect of Fast Food

Introduction

Fast food plays an important role among city dwellers. Today, people have to live in a hectic and competitive environment. Some people even have to work around the clock to meet both ends. Time scarcity can be a problem for today's society. “Time scarcity changes the food consumption patterns.”(Jabs, 2006, 42) People began to decrease the time for food preparation and increased the frequency in the consumption of fast food. The fast food restaurants have their own unique characteristics to cater to the need of today's society. A fast food restaurant is characterized by speedy supply after ordering. The employee will prepare the food in huge quantities in advance and keep warm before selling to the consumer, which reduces the waiting time for consumers. In this respect, the fast food restaurants cater well with today human needs such as convenience and time restriction.

Discussion

It is easy for a family to get a loan to open an easy food franchise as running a fast food restaurant requires capital from investors. The amount of capital is affordable for middle income families to own a fast food restaurant: For this reason, the numbers of fast food chains grow quickly around the world. According to the fast food guide , there are three hundred forty seven fast food restaurants in Salt Lake City and four thousand fast food restaurants in the Los Angelos. The most notable fast food restaurants are MacDonald, Wendy, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken. According to the Wikipedia, MacDonald, which is the largest fast food chain in the world, is the pioneer for the fast food restaurant. It was founded in 1940 by Dick and Mac Donald. Based on the National Restaurant Association, consumers in the United Stated spent roughly 110 billion dollars on fast food in year 2000.

Several lawsuits failed to convince the judges that fast food diet causes the health problems. This was because there were others factors, such as eating habit and life style, needed to be considered. However, these lawsuits showed that people were concerned about the nutrition content in the fast food. Hence I will discuss the causes of the fast food diet in the following paragraphs.

First and foremost, aggressive marketing of the fast food restaurants causes people to have unhealthy diet. Fast food advertisement appears in many media, such as radio, newspapers, magazines and television. According to Harrison (2005), fast foods comprised 83% of advertised foods in year 2005 which has the biggest market share in the United States. Television advertisement is most powerful and influential media among others. She also noted that the fast food advertisement has a huge influence on the children who spend a lot of time watching television. This advertisement may change the children's eating pattern for their entire life. With a consistent influence of advertisement, the idea of fast food diet is rooted deeply in their mind.

Besides the belligerent advertising, the price war among the fast food restaurants has a great impact on consumer's eating ...