Chew On This: Everything You Don’t Want To Know About Fast Food

Fast food and the automobile have changed the face of American cities, making them all appear like the kind of suburban development pioneered in Los Angeles. Schlosser and Wilson explain how “fast food restaurants often serve as the first wave of sprawl, rolling into a new area and then starting a flood of identical stores” (52). McDonald's even uses helicopters to take satellite photos of how suburbs are growing and look for cheap land across highways and roads, where they can open new restaurants. Crucially, this means that “technology that was originally invented to help the military spy on its enemies became one more tool to help fast food chains sell more hamburgers” (52). 

McDonald's workers are often young high school students who “open the fast food outlets in the morning, close them at night and keep them going at all hours in between” (54). Teenagers are the perfect candidates for the low-paying fast food industry, because most do not yet have families to support and their “youthful inexperience” makes them “easier to control than adults” (54). 

Factory-assembly-line techniques are applied to fastfood kitchens, meaning that all food arrives frozen and ovens can look like commercial laundry presses. At Taco Bell, food arrives dehydrated from a giant factory in Michoacán, Mexico and hot water is added to it.