Eric Schlosser’s vivid descriptions of slaughter houses and contaminated meat makes me wonder many things.
The primary being: why the hell are we still eating the stuff?!? Seriously. We know all of the meat we consume has to come from somewhere, and we know we have a very high demand for meat. Put the two together and you get cattle crammed into tight spaces and slaughtered by the herds. Combine that with rushed, untrained workers, and you have a contaminated Big Mac. Mmmmm grilled cow pie on a bun.
I myself prefer to order any grilled chicken item on any fast food restaurant’s menu. I think I have consumed approximately three McDonald’s hamburgers over the last five years. I found myself spitting out half the thing because it was full of gristle and chunks of unidentified something. I believe if I can tell you exactly what I am eating, I’m doing pretty good. For instance, a grilled chicken salad. I can pick out the different components that are essentially unaltered. “This is lettuce, this is a whole chicken breast, these are cherry tomatoes,” I could say. If I don’t know what I’m eating, I shouldn’t be eating it. This is a main reason I avoid fried foods… I don’t know what’s in the breading, I don’t know what’s in the deep frying oil… I’m not even sure I know what’s under the breading.
Perhaps we still pull up to a McDonald’s drive thru simply out of habit. Perhaps a bad habit. Based on Schlosser’s book, eating fast food is bad for us. So is smoking. Eating fast food can lead to obesity, heart disease, even food poisoning with E.coli. Smoking cigarettes can lead to many forms of cancer, respiratory problems, and stroke. Yet millions do each. Perhaps eating fast food is just a habit we don’t think about. We hear all about how it can be bad for us, yet there we are ordering fries. Smokers are told their habit, their addiction is bad for them, yet they light up nonetheless. What if we thought of eating fast food as we think of smoking: shortening our life expectancies. We should be smart about what we ingest. You don’t consume arsenic; you don’t smoke. You don’t eat a greasy cow pie; you don’t eat fast food.
