Fast Food Influence - Essay Example

Fast food Influence Fast food has become a unified American with restaurants serving a quick bite at each mall and roadside across the whole country. Many of them are seen indulged in serving up just cheap hamburgers and greasy fries. Schlosser traces the development of fast food chains throughout the country after the World War II. He writes, “Twenty-five years ago, only a handful of American companies directed their marketing at children…today children are being targeted by phone companies, oil companies and automobile companies as well as restaurants chains” (Schlosser , Chp.2). He opposes the growth of the industry for bringing up such cultural maladies like obesity, classism, environmental desolation, and ultimately the American global imperialism.

He is a National Magazine Award-winning journalist who spent three years in analyzing and studying the history and evolution of fast food industry. He also included the business practices of major chains together with the chemical trepidations behind it into his study. The development of the fast-food industry poses several ethical questions for its directly targeting children as the primary consumers. Fast-Food Nation is a fascinating exposure of What Schlosser holds to be wrong with fast-food across the country.

Schlosser expresses his idea about what is actually in those fries and burgers and explains why their comparatively inexpensive prices do not reveals their factual human costs. He throws powerful arguments against the industries that are exploiting the workers, obliterating the environment, and forming an obese society in the relentless pursuit of making profit. Most of the chemical industries in New Jersey manufacture fast foods with realistic and delicious flavors to attract the consumers, especially the children.

Modern meatpacking plants like the Dickensian also are accused of having one in every three of its workers undergoing serious injuries during every year. Besides, the people are seen lenient towards the addictive, calorific, and potentially disease-carrying foods. The growth of fast-food industries like McDonalds and Disney developed standardization for American culture, and have brought in widespread obesity, urban sprawl and much more disasters. It poses often negative cultural implications, by only providing impressive snippets of information.

It affects especially the children who are mainly targeted as consumers of fast-food. Looking back to my childhood experiences I understand that children contribute to the important demographics to marketers as they have their own purchasing power. They can influence the buying decisions of their parents and constitute the adult consumers of the future. Young children are indeed especially vulnerable to misleading advertisements and always think that they are true. My childhood experiences with the advertising had influenced the buying decision of my parents a lot.

I was much fascinated by the advertisements on toys and gaming accessories. Action toys from movies and video games always attracted my attention. Such advertisements instilled within me even a habit of collecting things. Unlike the other kids who collect marbles, stamps or coins, I developed a huge collection of store-bought items cards and figures. Later, when the Pokemon launched a set of 150 Pokemon characters into the market, their strategy was to attract the young children to collect all the toy figures.

And so they introduced their marketing campaign called “Gotta Catch ‘Em All”, which had a great impact on my younger siblings as well. They were highly influenced by the campaign that they started to buy the cheaply made, over priced figures to add to their collection. About this period Schlosser writes, “One marketing expert has called the 1980s the decade of the child Consumer” (Schlosser, Chp.2). The worst thing is that most collecting habits are short-lived fads and leaving behind boxes of discarded toys.

From my experience with my cousins about the fast-food culture, I think that a lot has changed about people’s eating habits over the years. American families are getting adapted to the fast moving life. In their family, both parents were working and they had to eat lunch at school. They had little time to make up much of a vegetable garden or cook themselves. The ethnic restaurants and fast-food restaurants were everywhere and eating out was common. After all, they did not need to know how to cook to feed themselves for they had packaged food at the reach of their hands.

They just reached for the outlets that catered to everyone’s tastes and preferences. My cousins were spending time riding in or pushing a grocery shopping cart at McDonalds or Disney instead of tending the family garden. And now, after several years of eating junk food conveniently, an alarming percentage of the populations have become severely overweight obese. In total, parents of young children have the responsibility of protecting their kids from insidious advertising and marketing strategies.

They have the important role to play in educating them and making them aware of the fallacy of advertising. Young Reports magazine writes “young children have difficulty distinguishing between advertising and reality in ads, and ads can distort their view of the world” (“Special Issues..”). Thus, the society should consider the impacts of disproportionate materialism on the development of the children’s self image and moral values. Works Cited Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001. Special Issues for Young Children. Media Awareness Network. Web 17 Sep 2011