Nearly 80% of Americans Say Fast Food Is Now a Luxury
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I'm referring to the correlation between riots/civil unrest and food scarcity. You're familiar with the world food crises (2022–present)?
It's possible to make that tasty, healthy, or relatively inexpensive. But it's not easy to do all three.
My fear would be that the price point fast food used to be able to hit is not populated by many healthy meals at all.
You can see how not every part of this is guaranteed right? And how removing even one makes it significantly more of a burden, and it's easy to imagine missing several of these.
>Yeah so you had time to do the shopping, cooking, and portioning every week which is at least a few hours right?
Yes, after taking 18 hours a semester and working 30 hours a week.
>And you had a single store nearby that could provide you with everything you needed in one go, and reliable access to it.
No I did not, I typically made several trips to markets and shops to get the things I required. Typically early in the morning or late in the evening.
>And of course a kitchen
No, a kitchenette in a tiny hole I called home.
>a way to store it during the week
Yes. Humans have figured out ways to store food for eons.
>a way to carry it
My backpack?
>and reheat it where you need to eat it.
Reheating not required, though I did use the microwave at the student lounge and work often.
>You can see how not every part of this is guaranteed right?
Every part wasn't guaranteed for me, not sure what point you're making?
>And how removing even one makes it significantly more of a burden
It's not a burden, it's an essential part of human existence that, checks notes, billions of people from the richest to the poorest countries do every day.
When I teach people to cook I usually point out that when you're at the point where you're in the kitchen with the ingredients out, 2/3 of the work is done. There's a lot of labor in planning and shopping.
Also people "around the world" may not be cooking at home as much as you assume either. Street food is everywhere and it is not new by any means. Individual household kitchens for city dwellers have not historically been the norm, and they still aren't in a lot of places.
But you're comparing it to getting fast food for every meal, which is also a chore. One way or another, feeding yourself and your family is always going to be a chore.
And it doesn't apply to lunch for most of the non-WFH world.
And takeout delivers these days.
I mean, I cook 90-95% of my meals from scratch with the odd canned ingredient and for the rest, rely on healthy-option microwave meals or a sandwich to stop me slipping into snacking for the times when depression or tiredness do not allow it, which keeps a latent eating disorder at bay.
But people who eat a lot of fast food do not always do so out of laziness. Large numbers of city dwellers barely have access to a kitchen, e.g. at least 1.5 million people in the UK and probably more like 3.5 million live in HMO (multiple occupant) accommodation that does not have a private kitchen; those people are lucky if they have access to their own hotplates.
It doesn't matter what people did before fast food. It matters what people can find now, in the life that we have now, as an alternative to fast food.
Just telling people they should cook their own meals from scratch is not good enough.
That is why the question of fast food now being a "luxury" is so interesting.
Because it likely means people who relied on fast food to meet dietary needs -- even fairly healthy fast food like fresh sandwiches (in the UK meaning) -- are now eating something worse, not something better.
It's naive to assume it will -- or even can -- lead to a renaissance in home cooking.
Well we don't have massive communal dining halls or poorhouses.
I think you underestimate the extreme poverty of food even for people in 1924 who had access to a communal kitchen.
Average nutrition in 1924 was not good. It was likely significantly worse than it is now. People were on average several inches shorter and life expectancy at birth in 1924 was less than 60 in the USA and the UK.
The life expectancy for, say, a 24 year old in 1924 would be lower still.
People did "stay alive", but they died young of diseases, many of them worsened by chronic malnutrition. Kids were literally severely malnourished in the USA until the national school lunch program was launched in the 40s, and the UK was only a bit ahead, providing breakfasts and sometimes lunches for kids from 1906 onwards, and then full school meals in the 40s. Adult malnutrition was rampant in the USA of the 1930s.
You are comparing 2024 with a romantic fiction, when the issue is what are the options in 2024.
The era of abundant cheap food, enough time to cook it, labour-saving devices and parents who were not both working is short, and it spans about 30 years from 1940 in the USA, and less in the UK due to rationing.
We don't have that life anymore. It would be better to engineer a culture of street food in the UK and USA, because that leads to more healthy food options for vastly more people (as well as catering efficiency and less food waste)
However, fast food has gotten mighty expensive in the past few years ($10+ for a combo meal feels obscene), and so I’m finding myself getting grab-and-go items like Lunchables at the grocery store instead of stopping at a fast food restaurant. Sometimes when I feel like spending more money, I prefer going to a sit-down restaurant where paying a few dollars more buys a better meal.
It consisted of a small, spongy sandwich, called a "McGriddle", which I will never order again; a single potato-patty "hash brown" thing; and a small black coffee.
This cost $14.
Surely I will continue to make other mistakes in my life, but this is one I can avoid in future.
But I think they mean "luxury" as in "optional" rather than "luxurious".
I had a Burger King gift card in my wallet when I arrived at the PATH terminal at the World Trace Center and after I walked out of the Oculus I saw a CHOPT salad restaurant across the street and a BK across the corner. BK was crowded inside and was emitting greasy fumes I could smell outside.
My calculation was that it could take most of 30 minutes to wait in line and get my food at the BK, at the CHOPT I punched my order into a tablet and had it in 3 minutes.
I worked at BK in the late 1980s and there they would try to have burgers ready in the steam tray and on the heat chute before you ordered them so you really could get it fast. Fast food restaurants don’t seem to do this anymore.
My favorite "fast food" place is an 8-decade-old neighborhood ice cream shop. They have a variety of good sandwiches in their refrigerator case, ready to grab & go. And none of 'em have the "opps, am I eating the wrapper?" chemo-plastic taste or mouth feel of modern fast food.
And maybe workers on harder-to-fill shifts get to take a few would-be-donated burgers home every day, too.
Burgers could sit in either the heat chute or the steam tray for 10 minutes and we were supposed to throw them out if they went over that limit. Under normal conditions we didn’t throw a lot of them out but we would go to a purely on demand model on Sunday afternoons when we could sometimes go 20 minutes between customers.
It's very distasteful to hit down
To clarify, the reason that I am surprised that my comment was taken this way is because very poor people often eat fast food out of necessity. For them, it's not a luxury at all.
In any case, it certainly wasn't an intentional insult or anything. I wasn't even talking about poor people at all.
$10 for a burger and fries isn't accessible for many.
The problem is if it's the tasty the right way it is expensive, and if it is the bad kind of tasty it's unhealthy.
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/01/business/dealbook/compani...
The pandemic lockdowns forced a lot of people to learn how to cook, lots more people who learned to bake bread, etc. This trend might be an extension of that development.
Kind of the motto of the 2020s: people spending the same but getting less
So, yes, telling metric is probably the number of visits.
What we are seeing is the outcome of a global pandemic and the ad hoc responses to a once in a 100+ year event. Things could be worse, we never had the recession that was predicted
Realistic minimum wage increases (meaning ones people have actually tried in real life that we have empirical evidence of) don't lower employment in practice either - the limit seems to be about 60% of local median wages.
Most modern jobs are so-called "bullshit jobs" where people sit around wasting time pretending they're doing something useful.
This was not true before the massive electronic industrialization in the mid to late 20th century. You can argue that society is better for automation, but there are very few facts to support the idea that it increased productive jobs.
If minimum wage doesn't affect employment, why not raise it to a million dollars per hour? Your assertion that it doesn't lower employment isn't factual except in cases where it is already lower than the lowest going rates or where it can be avoided (under-the-table jobs or contract work).
In any case, the real minimum wage is zero. If your job is costed above what it is worth, the employer will eliminate it.
The reason to implement automation (capital investments) is that it increases productivity, not to lower costs. Productivity improvements increase employment in an industry because they make the industry more competitive so it can grow.
> The jobs provided to the guys making the machines are paid less overall than the jobs they replace.
For interesting cases against this see "the invention of ATM machines increased the number of bank tellers" and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox.
> Most modern jobs are so-called "bullshit jobs" where people sit around wasting time pretending they're doing something useful.
You'd think a supposed leftist author like Graeber would realize that "workers don't do useful work" is not a leftist thing to say and is basically agreeing with Ayn Rand. I recommend ignoring him.
> If minimum wage doesn't affect employment, why not raise it to a million dollars per hour?
You left out the conditions which I was very careful to state. A million dollars an hour is more than 60% of the local median wage.
> Your assertion that it doesn't lower employment isn't factual
This is the conclusion of all known empirical evidence.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-15-minimum-wage-is-pretty-...
> In any case, the real minimum wage is zero. If your job is costed above what it is worth, the employer will eliminate it.
This is "econ 101", but you shouldn't think about labor economics until you know econ 201 or you'll get it wrong - standard theories also say that raising the minimum wage can increase employment, for instance due to monopsony effects (employers can set wages too low if they don't have better information) and search effects (eliminating bad jobs helps people find good jobs.)
Of course that's not the only way to do it. Australia and Denmark have two pretty different good systems here.
More money in the economy means more inflation. You can take money out with taxes and slow non-govt debt based influx with interest rates (the fed's primary tool)
Doesn't look true anyway.
Got to be some weird biased study or data sample or something.
If I am on a strict diet and treat myself to ice cream once a month max, that is a luxury, in the sense that I don't consume it often, because it is expensive in terms of my caloric budget.
It doesn't mean that ice cream itself is considered luxurious by the general public.
I think my confusion was caused by a difference of calling the food a luxury vs calling the act of having the food a luxury.
Nearly 80% of Americans Say HAVING Fast Food Is Now a Luxury.
vs
Nearly 80% of Americans Say Fast Food Is Now a Luxury.
If it was worded the first way, I don't think I would have questioned it the way that I did.
Because that's what it's short for when used standalone about a product like that.
I don't at all view fast food, the item itself as a luxury item.
But I can see how the act or experience of having fast food and all that comes with that process as being a luxurious process or experience. The speed, convenience and simplicity of having it could be a luxury.
But I don't think for example if you presented a bunch of people with a buffet of food items (ranging from fast food to home cooked dishes to nice restaurant dishes) that anyone would classify the fast food items as luxury items.
That's how it makes sense in my head. Show a person a buffet of food that contains fast food items and chef cooked items and ask them which ones are luxury food items. I don't think 80% of people would include the big mac and fries in their list of luxury food items.
But ask a busy person if the act of grabbing mcdonalds from a drive thru on the way from place to place is a luxury, then I can see more people saying yes.
So to me it's the act or process that is the luxury, not the fast food items themselves.
IMO luxurious food would be made from high quality ingredients and have an appealing presentation and an appealing consumption experience. And sure, to do all that would made it expensive, but expense is the result of luxury, not the cause.
Just because someone decides to charge a lot for some crap doesn't make it luxurious IMO.
I consider fine dining a luxury. Fast food doesn't come close to being considered a luxury to me and I am not in any way rich.
> "the quality possessed by something that is excessively expensive"
not really representative of the entire population.
The current population of the United States of America is 341,695,345 as of Friday, June 7, 2024
I dont eat any fast food.