Fast Food

Fast Food | Food | Fast foods are convenience foods that can be prepared and served very quickly. On average, one-fifth of the population of the USA (45 million people) eat in a fast-food restaurant each day. Although it is possible to eat a nutritious food fast, the menus usually stacked on most dieticians' "Avoid Lists". Fast food if what one eats in the vast majority of restaurants in the U.S. The term fast food refers to the speed of food preparation and customer service and speed of your eating habits.

Fast foods, include french fries, burgers, fried chicken, thick cheese covering pizza. These fast foods appeal to the Western palate by their fat, low in fiber and nutrients, but a lot of salt (a hamburger can contain more than 1,000 milligrams of sodium). To make matters worse, they are often served in sugar-laden soft drinks or creamy milkshake full of empty calories or fat.

Those who regularly eat fast foods should be particularly selective, moderating the intake of unhealthy options and choosing healthy options, such as salads with low-fat dressings, wholegrain buns, and skimmed milk. See also junk food.

The restaurant industry, however, has traditionally preferred the designation "quick service." For hourly wage earners—whether factory hands or store clerks—take-out lunch wagons and sit-down lunch counters appeared at factory gates, streetcar stops, and throughout downtown districts in the late nineteenth century. For travelers, lunch counters also appeared in railroad stations nationwide. Fried food prevailed for its speed of preparation, as did sandwich fare and other fixings that could be held in the hand and rapidly eaten, quite literally, "on the run." Novelty foods, such as hot dogs, hamburgers, french fries, came to dominate, first popularized at various world's fairs and at the nation's resorts. Soft drinks and ice cream desserts also became a mainstay. Thus, "fast food" also came to imply diets high in fat and caloric intake. By the end of the twentieth century, the typical American consumed some three hamburgers and four orders of french fries a week. Roughly a quarter of all Americans bought fast food every day.

The rise of automobile ownership in the United States brought profound change to the restaurant industry, with fast food being offered in a variety of "drive-in" restaurant formats. Mom-and-pop enterprise was harnessed, largely through franchising, in the building of regional and national restaurant chains: Howard Johnson's, Dairy Queen, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, and Taco Tico. Place-product-packaging was brought forcefully to the fore; each restaurant in a chain variously shares the same logo, color scheme, architectural design motif, and point-of-purchase advertising, all configured in attention-getting, signlike buildings. Typically, fast food restaurants were located at the "roadside," complete with driveways, parking lots, and, later, drive-through windows for those who preferred to eat elsewhere, including those who ate in their cars as "dashboard diners." Critical to industry success was the development of paper and plastic containers that kept food hot and facilitated "carry-out." Such packaging, because of the volume of largely nonbiodegradable waste it creates, has become a substantial environmental problem.

In 2000, Mcdonalds, the largest fast food chain, operated at some 13,755 spots in the U.S and Canada. The company distinctive "golden arches" have spread all over the world, as well as in North America. Abroad, fast food has become a stand as an important symbol of American culture, if not economic, accomplishment. And just as it did at home, fast food was the same, a clear symbol of modernity. Historically, fast-food merchandising contributed significantly to the accelerated pace of everyday life by means of standardization. At the beginning of the century, is completely surrounded the mass production and mass marketing techniques, a small-scale restaurant. Restaurant chains, in turn, has become completely rationalized within a standardized purchasing, marketing and management systems. Such a system will depend on the pool of cheap, mostly unskilled workers, a service of fast food is known for low wages and, consequently, the restaurant of quick service.

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