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Medical and other Implications of the Fast Foods Culture
'Medical and Other Implications of the Fast Foods Culture'
Thomas E. Isaac
The fast foods industry has become a significant component of our modern economies. It provides readily available meals for busy people constantly on the move in the big cities and stop off points for travelers even outside strictly urban settings. The fast foods industry is as old as civilization itself. Perhaps Elijah would not have had to impose himself upon a penurious widow had a food outlet been available in ancient Palestine, but later in the wilderness ravens provided him with a fast foods service. Christ's feeding of the thousands with loaves and fishes is a splendid example of the episodic emergence of such a business in former times, with all of the attendant problems of an unbalanced diet and with baskets of waste left over. In cities such as ancient Pompeii there can still be seen sites where food sales were conducted, suggesting that the business had become a commercial necessity given the enormous demographic movements in the Roman Empire of the first century. Today however the industry is endemic to our economy, and its outlets a permanent and characteristic feature of the contemporary landscape.
A wide range of quick and tasty meals are provided in these fast foods outlets: sandwiches, hamburgers, meat and fish products, fries and salads, pizzas and desserts, fruits and vegetables. They are not without nutritional value, many of them like the meat offerings, rich in protein content and quite well suited to sustain the urban worker for long periods away from home. However the methods of preparation used to insure a quick, hot and tasty meal often involve frying in fats and saturated oils, lard and butter, and simplicity and price renders unrealistic the provision of a balanced diet. Fast foods therefore have become associated with poor eating habits and have been blamed for the increasing prevalence of a host of cholesterol related diseases, hypertension, strokes, cardio-vascular illness, diabetes, kidney and liver failure. The extravagant use of sugar and salts to enhance taste have in no small measure contributed to the bad name that "junk foods" have acquired. The increasing medical problem of obesity can be traced directly to a culture of fast foods consumption against a sedentary lifestyle and the pressure and psychological demands of contemporary living. Children constitute one of the most vulnerable populations to this new fast foods related consumerism, with the loss of childhood and play which has come to characterize their immobile, over-schooled lifestyles and their virtual narcotic addiction of pizzas and chips.
Eric Schlosser in his book Fast Food Nation: the Dark Side of the All-American Meal has argued that the new industry has allowed for the encroachment of huge corporations in the lives of ordinary working people. It has radically transformed the American diet, landscape, economy and workforce. Its factory assembly-line principles have led to the mechanization of food preparation and the virtual victimization of worker and consumer alike. He notes the appallingly unsanitary conditions in which food is often prepared for the public and the many instances of pathogens discovered in food served in fast foods outlets. The fast foods industry provides us with a splendid cultural signifier that illuminates significant aspects and trends in our contemporary modern and post modern civilization; indeed it functions as a symptom of a wider social pathology that the altered conditions of living have precipitated upon us all. The pace of life has accelerated as we have moved as a species from the steam engine of the early industrial revolution, to the internal combustion engine of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, to jet propulsion and now the dizzy speeds in space traveling that rocketry science offers us. The resultant social upheaval and psychological dislocation that this has induced are at the root of many of our social ills and moral dilemmas today.
Mealtime was always a significant communal event that affirmed the family as a social unit and the family table as the locus of dialogue and communion. Partaking of the same meal is symbolic of a unity of substance and an ontological grounding and thereby becomes a sacramental moment in the life of the family unit. Eating together has always transcended its overtly biologic functions and has provided an occasion for the meeting of minds, between relatives and friends, people we can trust with our lives and with whom we are willing to share. Even among animals and birds ritual eating appears as a mating and courtship signifier that registers sexual union and the onset of relationship and conjugality. Eating therefore is figured in many religious systems as sacrament and ritual. This pervasive signification of the eating ritual is negated in the fast foods outlet where we eat with strangers, in a wordless, non-communicative act, that discloses the homelessness and absence of dwelling of the urban commuter as well as the modern predicament of existential alienation and rootlessness. I choose to eat in this unfriendly environment, despite the illusory ambience of an inviting milieu, because mother is no longer cooking at home and the essence of family has vanished. The collapse of the family as an institution bears an almost direct relationship with the rise of the fast foods industry, having a mutually causative and consequential effect on each other. This collapse of the family which is still the bed-rock of our modern institutional structures has unleashed powerfully destructive currents within the social fabric which are eroding the very foundations of our civilization.
Herbert Marcuse in his classic analysis of our contemporary culture One Dimensional Man has traced the pervasively rigidifying and homogenizing tendencies in our civilization that are evident in lifestyle options as much as in cultural artifacts. That horrifying sameness that characterizes modern and postmodern cultures alike is at the root of the present predicament of anonymity and loss of individuality and essence experienced today. Francois Lyotard defines the monotony and repetitiveness of modern living as a replication ad infinitum et nauseam of simulacra that are virtually without archetypes and function as copies of other copies. The de-personalizing and de-realizing effect of this structural shift in our post-modernity that transcends ideological as well as historical difference threatens the very survival of man as we know him and enunciates the onset of a post-humanist phase in our cultural experience. The global standardization of taste, experienced in a KFC package handed through a window in a passing vehicle with the minimum of human interaction registers the appalling mechanization of life that typifies our contemporary ways of being. This unending reproduction of the simulacra can be seen in our housing lots, in automobile manufacturing, in our city malls and indeed in the total narrative of city life, subways, airports et al. The Utopian telos of the globalization process which has contributed to the unification of the human family has generated its negative dialectic in the insidious liquidation of cultural diversity and difference in our contemporary modalities of cultural experience.
For Marcuse this is a direct outcome of the culture of late capitalism with its consumerist values and the infinite packaging for consumption. The commodification of mealtime virtually predicted in Marx's brilliant analysis of the commodity structure at the root of our capitalist modality of exchange and social relations is graphically captured in the Mc Donald's' package. For Georg Luckacs the commodity is fetishized and reified, possessing a phantom objectivity that supplants the ontological substantiality of mealtime and home cooking. The meal package has lost most of its use value for its primary exchange value and thus becomes entrenched in a massive system of production, commerce and export. Such commercialization easily explodes into a vast global system of economic imperialism and the loss of national sovereignty and identity. Increasingly for the US where most of these multi-national industries are based, diplomatic and military policy is fuelled by the need to make the world a safer place for Mc Donald's and KFC. Indeed they now function as the signposts, within the urban landscape of the great cities of the world, of US cultural and economic imperialism. Really understanding Ben Laden (which the West defiantly refuses to do) is to perceive the world-historical indignation of a proud Islamic civilization to the cultural impudence of an aggressive and insensitive Occident.
The fast foods culture which discloses in a very significant way the tragic artificialization of life which has come to define our peculiar modernity/post-modernity represents a single facet of our everydayness. The death of walking to work, to school, to the park for the pseudo-mobility of the treadmill, or the disappearance of singing and music production, bombarded as we are by packaged music on CDs and the media, or the avoidance of play as action and participation, opting instead for spectatorship and fandom, or the demise of calligraphic writing with our desktops and punch-in machines, threaten the very survival of our humanity, the achievement of thousands of years of slow developmental progress. It is almost as if we are fated to enact Freud's famous postulation of the Death/Thanatos instinct which always stands over against the thriving forces of life and Eros. Martin Heidegger, perhaps the twentieth century's most brilliant philosophical mind, has contended that inherent in our civilization is what he calls the forgetfulness and abandonment of being. His quest of being and ontological grounding has been by way of a phenomenological analytic of human being or Dasein, whose inauthenticity and fallenness into the publicity of the "they" he bemoans with an almost religious intensity. In Contributions to Philosophy he identifies acceleration and technicity as contemporary ways of being as much as features of a civilization, and threats to the restoration of selfhood and authenticity. Living and eating within the public gaze and the resultant loss of privacy and security are hallmarks of our contemporary desolation and lostness. Indeed that lostness is disclosed most forcibly in the experience of a defamiliarizing non-locality which has severed the age-old linkage between event and place. We eat anywhere, in the car, at the station, while working, just as we experience the thrill of football in our beds watching TV or on the streets on our cell-phones.
Since the late nineteenth century our great artistic minds foresaw much of these developments and engraved them on the aesthetic landscape with an apocalyptic pathos that indeed is more relevant today than when written or produced. T.S. Elliot's Waste Land paints a lurid picture of man's desolation and irredeemability as a tragic, disembodied consciousness picks its way throughout the surrealistic landscape of post-War Europe. The collective experience of fragmentation and disconnect received its most stark embodiment in Picasso's monstrous distortions of Vitruvian man and his dismantlement of perspective. Brecht's alienation effect in drama refuses to perpetuate the aesthetic illusion of a transcending reality in art and sets out to undeceive and demystify the audiences of the modern stage. The majestic classical orchestrations of pre and post Enlightenment Europe gradually through a slow process of chromatization and a shifting centre soon gave way to the amorphous atonalities of Schonberg or Webern. That centrelessness and absence of clearly defined structures found some of its most forceful materializations in the pastiche of modern architecture.
The real challenge that confronts us as a civilization is how to manage the new forces of acceleration and technicity, mechanization and gadgetry, without abandoning our rootedness in human being or without a loss of essence. The new dialectic that modernity has enunciated is not an either-or dialectic but a both-and without a necessary Hegelian synthesis. Indeed it may well be the synthesis that is destructive. Modern man has to recognize the inescapability of change even as he preserves the sanctity of tradition and the need for machinery even as he conserves his ecological inheritance and his historically grounded human ways of being. The ultra-conservative, often Christian fanatical appeals of a return to Eden or its neo-pagan counterpart, a Romanticist return to nature, are pseudo-solutions that are impractical and delusive, but their message remains timely and relevant. The Christian church has warned that God alone will bring an end to history and human civilization. In our Nietzsche universe where God has been proclaimed as dead, man has dared to pronounce the end of history and the demise of the human. ...End-time signals indeed.
Outline of Presentation
Fast Foods: definition and range, junk food, soft drinks, GM products...local doubles....
Food supplied quickly with minimal service...cooked in advanced in bulk, kept hot...restaurant chains with glamorous outlets...hamburgers, sandwiches, meat, chips, pizza, salads, desserts....ancient institution{Rome etc) but characteristic of modern lifestyles....can be extended to GM products (recombinant DNA bio-technologies; the trans gene as genetically engineered)
Food Value: not without nutritional value, as well as social and economic...often high protein content....calories, fat, saturated fats, sugar, salt, lack of nutritional balance, beef tallow, lard, hydrogenated oils(frying), cooked with oil and butter, lacking fruits/vegetables.
Medical Effects: diabetes, cardio-vascular diseases, strokes, cholesterol-related illnesses, hypertension, kidney failure, obesity....driving population and lack of exercise...disappearance of play and childhood.
The Fast foods Culture: diagnostic - symptom of a cultural pathology/ altered conditions of existence...accelerated pace of modern living...the automobile and airplane.
Eric Schlosser: Fast Food Nation: the Dark Side of the All-American Meal: encroachment of corporations in lives of working people...radically transformed American diet, landscape, economy. workforce...principles of factory assembly line to commercial kitchen...pathogens in foods and unsanitary preparation.
Mealtime as a cultural-social locus that grounds family...the communal meal as sacrament that sacralizes relationship...eating as courtship ritual.
Mealtime negated...eating among strangers and existential alienation and loneliness...eating in haste and the pace of modern living.
Collapse of the family/ mother's cooking as signature of family identity and uniqueness...homelessness and the absence of dwelling.
Standardization/homogenization of taste...fad and fashion in fast foods culture...anonymity within mass society and anomie...loss of individuality and identity/essence...depersonalizing tendencies in modern lifestyles...globalization and sameness in the narrative of the city...infinite replication of simulacra (Lyotard) and the artificialization of life (GM foods)...Marcuse's one-dimensional man....aporias of postmodernity.
Culture of late capitalism...packaging for sale and the commodification of meals...the franchise...fetishization and reification (Lukacs)
The multi-national corporation...global omnipresence of Mc Donald's and KFC...the new cultural imperialism (US) in a uni-polar society...politics, commerce and military aggression...the Ben Laden response and the clash of civilizations.
Heidegger's analytic of dasein...forgetfulness/abandonment of being and being-towards-death (Freud's death/Thanatos instinct)...the fallenness of Dasein into the publicity of the 'they'...living/eating within the public gaze and the loss of privacy....non-locality, acceleration and technicity as features of contemporary civilization (Contributions to philosophy)....Tillich's demonic structures of culture.
The new postmodern despair...fragmentation, disjunction, disconnect...poetry of Elliot, art of Picasso, Bretch's alienation effect, postmodern architecture and pastiche, GM foods and the artificialization of life.
Towards a new synthesis or a return to Nature/Eden and its Christian / neo-pagan implications...ecological/green movement....not a romantic return to nature but Hegelian synthesis that accommodates the project of modernity....the Church's message of apocalypse and end-time signals.