"At some point, they are going to have to knock a hole in the side of the wall and throw the rotisserie chicken out as you drive by." Harry Balzer

In modern societies, fast food and take-away meals became very popular and one of children's favourite meals. Of course this kind of food can be very useful since it is very quick to cook and eat, which is why students and workers for instance may consider it as a good alternative. Moreover, there are more and more women who work and do not have time to prepare meals ; people in general are busier than they used to be, because of work and leisure that are more and more numerous. Ready-prepared and take away food may also be an alternative for people living alone. But how is it possible to love fast food more than any other kind of food?

 

There are four main concerns cited about fast food in the book by Alan Warde and Lydia Martens: health, food quality and authenticity, personal tastes and cost. If a meal is quite expensive and made with suspect and unhealthy food, where is the pleasure in eating it?

As I said in my previous message, the first pleasure provided by fast food is the simple fact to eat out (this implies that you do not bring take-away meals home). Even if we are talking about fast food, it still implies going out to have dinner in a different place than home.

Another pleasure, going with the first one, is the fact that you do not need to cook, if you are busy or tired and do not feel like cooking. A mother said in an interview "we do that mainly on a Friday when I get so sort of fed up". As I was saying at the beginning of this message, fast food can be very useful and convenient, for instance when you're having dinner with other people and none of you want to waste time cooking, fast food permits to have dinner as soon as you are hungry. This way, being sat at a table in a fast food to have dinner with friends would provide the same pleasures than eating in an actual restaurant, except the service is quicker. After all, it is perhaps better than eating in a gloomy canteenat work or at school...

However, the idea of only "enjoying food" referred to in the previous message cannot be taken into account as far as fast food is concerned. Indeed, enjoying food implies enjoying good food, I mean well-prepared food, a meal that someone took care to make properly. And this is not really the case with fast food.