How many times have you decided, against your best judgment, your doctor’s advice, and the globally agreed upon medical wisdom that fast food is unhealthy, and decided to order that delicious double burger you saw on TV the other day? If your answer is “quite often,” then you’re one in an ever growing number of people who buy and consume fast food. In this short essay, I will give a couple of reasons why that is and suggest some solutions.
First off, it all comes back to modernity: time is a scarce resource in modern life. Speaking for myself, I rarely have time to cook a proper meal; the process involves much more preparation than I honestly have time for. Fast food has literally become a time-saver for many people. Even worse, we’re literally encouraged to save time on food by the thousands of aggressive ads we’re forcibly exposed to everyday. Why would I go through the hustle of cooking or going to a proper restaurant, when brand X is currently offering their best meal package at half price just one block away from my place?!
So how do we fix this? In my opinion, our best hope is education. Parents and schools must aggressively educate young people away from fast food starting at a very young age. It must be ingrained in our children’s psyche that they should avoid fast food like they would avoid drugs. The only other thing that could work would be higher taxes on fast-food chains. Such a measure might create a financial incentive that makes people think twice before consuming fast-food.
There doesn’t seem to be a ready-made magical solution to this growing unhealthy habit of fast-food in our societies. Education and taxes are our last resort unless we come up with a new type of healthy lab grown fast-food. Everything is possible.