Everyday Evidence of Fast Food Dominance: Tennis, Tantalizing and Tiny Tim

While playing tennis last week with a good friend, during one particularly energetic rally, I broke a string on the racket! After the match was over, we were talking, and he mentioned that the business where we had our rackets restrung for many years had recently closed. He went on to say that although the business was gone, some out-of-town organization had bought the inventory and set up shop in a new location, and that’s where things turned interesting and somewhat amusing. It seems that the new place was in an area of town that I hadn’t gone to in quite a while, so I asked him for directions. Most people are familiar with how locals always give directions with the expression, “It’s right next to ‘this business’ or where ‘some business’ used to be.” The funny thing was, every business he used trying to help me was a fast food restaurant or some other high-calorie, low-quality food place! After finally realizing that I was relatively fast food directionally challenged, he said: http://uchem.berkeley.edu/forum/read.php?26,500586

“You know, it used to be that we gave directions by using gas stations, but now it’s always restaurants, usually fast food ones!” It started me thinking about this recent phenomenon. It appears to me that a week doesn’t go by in my small city where a new tantalizing fast-food or high calorie-low quality food business opens, sometimes replacing one going out of business, sometimes not. I joked that they needed to find ways of making an intersection have more than four corners for restaurants, then realized that they already have! We have areas where restaurants are in tight double blocks with only one side facing the street with the other business attached like townhouses in a square. https://secure.web.emory.edu/forums/read.php?9,2113,2113#msg-2113

Then this formation is sometimes doubled by making it two stories so there are eight places where only one would have been. It might be fine if the quality of the food was good, but they are nothing special and certainly not that healthy — just quick, tasty, and numerous so we can eat a different type of unhealthy food most every day and every meal. The crafty food industry has evolved a way to make our trough more and more appealing without improving the quality of what’s in it in any way at all. If we are going to have a chance with this crappy cornucopia of consumption, we’d best be educated and vigilant. - See more at: http://www.sarticles.net/article/how-you-sit-at-the-workplace