I think that the fast food industry is fine as it is, but people who need something fast and are too tired to cook, or too poor to afford kitchenwares and ingredients, or who have trouble wasting food need another option. As it is, even the “Fresh,” “Healthy,” “Organic,” fast food restaurants and table service chains are too healthy. The problem is that, in order to make a profit on food, you have to manage inventory very well, and you have to sell people things that they want to eat at a price they can afford. A healthy BigMac cannot cost the same as an unhealthy BigMac, because ingredients like salt and fat and sugar, which can compensate for lower quality meat, bread, tomato, and dressing, are cheaper than higher quality ingredients. In order to still turn a profit with higher costs, McDonald’s would have to develop new inventory management technology or slim down their menu.
There are healthy options at most places, but nobody buys them because nobody wants to eat them. A boring old salad, which costs more than a hamburger and is less satisfying takes a lot of willpower to buy. For a lot of people, that good feeling that they get when they shove something hot and delicious and slathered in fat and salt is the only good thing they have to look forward to in their entire broken down, soulless treadmill of a life. Kate Moss said that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. Kate Moss is a cokemonkey whose bulimia must have burned off all her taste buds, because Cheesecake Factory makes me want to be fat. See, if I eat enough Cheesecake Factory Cheesecake, I’ll get real big, and once I’m really big, you know what I’ll be able to do? Eat the hell out of some more fucking cheesecake, that’s what.
Cheesecake doesn’t move, I don’t have to chase it. Why do I need to be fast for? I have a car if I need to go somewhere far, who cares if I sweat when I play cards? What’s my alternative, as a person, to eating things that make me happy? Eat only things that I hate for six months or longer, while each day performing strenous activity that takes me away from the computer/television combo I have in my living room? I don’t want to do those things. I especially don’t want to do those things so many times that I start to like doing them, because that’s basically like saying, in six months, the person I am today will be dead, and in his place, will be a condescending prick with a lot of blousy shirts and a wrinkled neck. Right now, getting up and turning the tatertots in my oven every eight minutes gets me winded, and that’s the way I like it, because then making tatertots seems like work, and when I’m done with my work, I can reward myself by eating the whole cookie sheet of tatertots and not feel bad. When I make eye contact at a stoplight with the spandex clad dick that bicycles everywhere, even in the dead of winter, I judge him, he judges me, but the difference is that one of us is slamming a big gulp while listening to Molly Hatchet, and the other one is a shivering bitch.
Comfort is victory.
