The Culinary Hegemony

(Also submitted for the Simon & Books challenge)

Enter a McDonald's restaurant, and one of the first things you notice is its menu. It is home to over 100 different meals, ranging from frappuccinos to Big Macs. Designed to 'trick' your taste buds, these hefty foods, dripping with hundreds of calories, do just that.

But they also do something more.

A Big Mac meal (which is composed of a Big Mac, medium Coke, and French Fries) is only $5.99. That is a MINUSCULE amount of money for the food it delivers. Absolutely minuscule. And it is because of this super-low price that causes fast-food's hegemonic domination. For food as tasty as a hamburger, you would expect to pay much more. But instead, you only get billed for less than 1/6 of the median hourly wage ($38.04) and get a coke plus some fries as an addition.

Fast food has found its best habitat right here, in a country where a penny saved really is a penny earned.

The only speed bump to the takeover of fast food is the fact that fast food is not healthy. In fact, just a Big Mac alone gives you almost half of your percent daily value for saturated fat. Add that to a coke and some fries, and boom! you have all your fatty and cholesterol needs satisfied. Eat a few more Big Macs, and you're on your way to diabetes.

So how, then, did fast food hegemons like McDonald's and Subway get over this mile-high barrier to reach their final goal of fast-food dominance?

The answer lies in the pure nature of humans.

Humans are animals. When we encounter something that tastes good, doesn't cost a lot of our personal wealth, and is easily accessible, there's hardly any reason not to love it. Sure, we all know that fat is bad, and sugar is even worse. Together, they can make you inflate into a balloon.

However, those are just statistics. Numbers and words, pure figments of imagination. We animals do not heed advice until we learn its truthfulness the hard way. No matter how much we are warned to brush our teeth, we always skip a day or two once in awhile, up to the point when you get a cavity. Then you start thinking.

Fast-food chains exploit just that, with the exception of the last part; you never start thinking. If you're not especially fat, then there's no reason to think that you will get fat; after all, you're not overweight. And so you believe you have immunity to getting chubby, causing you to freely eat fatty and sugary foods without restriction. This then causes, unsurprisingly, you to get fat, but then, it's too late. You have gotten addicted to the savory flavor and juiciness of hamburgers. Soon, you would've have gotten so obese that another hamburger, or two, or even ten won't make a difference. This just justifies your unhealthy diet even more; "I'm already this fat, who cares about another hamburger or two."

The fast-food monster has taken over one more person.

Now, the question becomes: How do I avoid this complete takeover? Is there any way whatsoever?

If the answer was eat healthy, then countless lives would've been saved. Healthy is an adjective, and opinions differ. Do you call salad healthy? Maybe it is. But what about the dressing you put on it? What exactly is in the mayonnaise or ranch that is so liberally heaped up on the top of your salad?

Does it now become simply don't eat anything, and hope you don't starve? No, in fact, it doesn't. The core of the problem is our mislead intellect telling us which things are healthy and which things aren't. We simply do not consider all of our choices, and that is what drives this seemingly unstoppable takeover.

Why not, instead of wasting twenty dollars on a pizza dinner delivered straight to your door, refine your culinary skills? Isn't making your own food fun and immersive?

The beast's weakness is just that.

Cooking is fun. In fact, we humans have been doing just that for almost two million years. It acts as a binding agent between individuals. The outcome, successful or not, and the joyous journey you took to get there will be forever branded in your memory.

There is more than just a social upside to cooking, however. When you cook, you know what's happening; after all, it's happening right in front of your eyes, compared to somewhere else in China. In the end, no matter the outcome, you know how it got there and can freely choose to either eat it or chuck it. Compare that freedom of choice to an import from your local Pizza Hut. Encounter a mysterious meatball? No problem! Just stuff it down your throat, and stop wondering so much.

Not everybody has the privilege to cook healthy, sadly. Healthy cooking requires nutritious materials, and those come at a price, a price often too high to be paid by low-income workers. And this drives them to seek a new source of food, namely, fast food.

This problem will forever keep the fast-food business up and running, unless solved. And solving this is much harder than perceived. After all, good food costs good amounts of money, as previously stated. And where that money will come from is still unknown. It surely can't come from taxpayer money, after all, every tax dollar spent on non-military causes is a half-dollar wasted. And philanthropists, no matter how generous they appear to be, always have a hidden goal they plan to reach through their actions. What will they get from genuinely donating money to the poor in order to feed them good food? And how will they get credited? Will they just send Koch-branded bucks and a message with it reading: "See you next election day,"?

The only solution is to take action yourself. It doesn't matter how; put 100 dollars in a redbox DVD case and a note saying, "Use this money well and do the same for someone else," or maybe just hand over some cash when you pass a veteran on the street asking for money.

Doesn't matter how, just do it.