Why don't we believe each other anymore? I ask because I was talking to a co-worker about the movie Fast Food Nation, and the book, and he began with the line that I have heard 10,000 times, "Well I'd have to see the statistics on..." I cut him off, this is beginning to get under my skin. The fast food industry begins and ends with intolerable cruelty to both animal and human. Everyone from the factory food production facilities (they used to be called "farms") that pump the animals full of chemicals to prevent diseases and increase body mass or milk production. My take? If you have to give the animal medicine so it doesn't die before you are ready to kill it, you might want to rethink the conditions you keep your animals in.

And we eat it. Those chemicals don't go away in the air after the animal is slaughtered, any thing water soluble they were just given is still in the muscle, anything lipid soluble hangs out in the fat for much longer (in humans it is 30 days and up, I don't know how long it takes for animals). The animal just had it's insides cut out, they ain't filtering anymore.

OK, Americans have a huge problem with our athletes doping. We don't like to think that the people we admire at the top of their sports cheated. We cry 'FOUL' and strip them of their titles and prestige. We stop buying their merchandise,following their footsteps and sometimes we quit watching or believing in the sport they participated in altogether. We aren't even eating our athletes and we don't like that they are using chemicals to do what they do. Why do we let the people that bring food to our mouths use chemicals in the very products we eat and drink without even a "hey that bounced close to the line are you sure that was fair"? In a cynical age where people will believe just about anything negative about another person, be it politician or movie star, how did the fast food industry create this little vacuum in which people might even believe part of the industry is corrupted, still choose to drive up to the window and place their order?

But no one wants to stop eating ad McD's and their ilk. They want to believe the workers are treated fairly and the animals grew up on happy little farms in the sunshine and that high school kid behind the counter is getting a working skill applicable to their future endeavors, but it's NOT TRUE! Workers are exploited whether they are from this country or illegally crossed, the only thing that kid has learned applicable to their future is how to show up because everything is automated, and animals are just animals, but really they aren't even animals anymore. They are bio-engineered meat growing organisms kept in pens, away from anything, light, real grass, movement, that would let them be anything close to the way creation made them, that made them animals. And yet we eat this.

I think I know where this suspension of belief got it's first foot hold on the American (and everywhere else we have exported it too) collective psyche. The kids meal. Give it away with a toy, build a playground and hire a clown and they will come. They will like the taste and crave it (I admit I do too) the rest of their lives. Forgetting that real food, grass fed animals that get to wander around and tomatoes grown in soil actually does taste better. Food that is in season and not shipped 1,000s of miles tastes better. Food that takes longer than 3.5 minutes to make tastes better.
How is this any different from making candy flavor cigarettes and marketing them with a cartoon camel? How is marketing their food during childrens' programming any different than this:



We knew smoking wasn't that good for you then, we know fast food isn't that good for you now and both are addictive

Fast food is easy, but so is dying. There is a ruling now that says you can't sue fast food companies if you are overweight. The reasoning was that the fast food companies did not force their product down anyone's throat. This is true, they aren't. How about we take them up on that. How about we cry "FOUL" and not buy and eat their products? Because if you believe even one of these facts, let alone all of them, then rather than suspend your belief, believe that this world, and our country, would be a better place without fast food franchises as they operate today, creating pain and suffering from the bottom to the top.