We have met the enemy

Stop it. Just give it a rest. Enough already. I am tired of people slagging fast food and fast food companies. Nope, you didn’t misread anything. Let’s be honest about fast food. It’s here. It’s been here for years and years and years. It’s not going to leave any time soon, and I think you know why. So, maybe it’s time to face it, live with it and learn to love fast food for what it is. It’s fast. It’s cheap. Ya, it’s food.

Let me start by saying, as much as I’ve been an advocate of perimeter shopping for fruit, vegetables, fish, poultry and meat, about buying whole foods, about eating clean and about staying-the-course, I do eat fast food. Yup. I do, especially when LOML and I are on the road. And, as old as I am, I can remember when fast food and I first met. I was about 16 years old. LOML and I hopped into his 1960 VW Beetle and drove to Harvey’s on Jane Street, in what was then Downsview. Harvey’s was THE drive-in restaurant at the time, and beside the amazing hand-cut fries, it was all about the hot cars and the guys watching the gals watching the guys as they revved their teenaged engines. Going to Harvey’s wasn’t something I did every day, in fact, it wasn’t something I did every week. Harvey’s was a treat for me. I certainly couldn’t afford to go very often, especially since I was still living at home, in high school, only working part-time and Mom provided three meals a day in exchange for staying in school, making my bed in the morning, doing the dishes and, generally, being part of the family. My parents, being who they were, simply couldn’t understand why anyone would go to a drive-in restaurant and eat “picnic food” out of paper bags. Hamburgers, fries, hotdogs and pop. Imagine paying for food you had to carry out and eat in your car. Oh, the horror.

Even on a picnic my parents refused to eat off paper plates, and actually had a set of dishes just for such an occasion, so eating out of a paper, take-away container would have been “un-bloodly-likely”.

Fast forward to the late sixties. I finished high school, found a full-time job, went to school parttime, and one day, as I walked home from work, noticed a place called McDonalds. My sister-in-law was with me, and we got two burgers, two small fries and shared a pop for less than a buck. Seriously. Less than a buck. And still it was a treat for us to eat in a fast food place, or should I say, pick up our food and sit on the curb to eat it. We must have been a sight—a couple of dressed-to-kill office types sitting on the curb, on Keele Street, eating out of a paper bag. Even at that price we couldn’t afford to make this an everyday occurrence. We had rent to pay, bus fare in inclement weather, and stockings to buy, not to mention, for me and LOML, tuition.

Time travel to now. Our kids (all grown and some are parents themselves) knew fast food, but it was a treat for them, too. By the time we had children, we could afford the price of a Whopper, a Kid’s Meal or Teen Burger, but decided it wasn’t a great idea, and let fruit and veg trump fries with gravy. However, we did use fast food as a bribe, and it usually worked in our favour. “Do your homework and clean that miserable excuse for a bedroom and we’ll get a box of Timbits as a treat.” Yup, that’s the kind of parents we were. Canadian Mother and Child, and Dr. Spock didn’t have a chapter on bribery. I think it might have been an error in the editing. Bribery worked well for us. You bet. So take me to court.

The truth? Well the truth is we, as lazy individuals, have given fast food its bad reputation. We, and our children, aren’t becoming fat and sick because of an occasional treat at the takeout shop. Nope, we’ve made a brand new food pyramid of fries, burgers, soda, donuts and a “slice”, and often the fast food is in addition to our regular meals. We blithely add 600 calories to our day and try to blame the fast food industry for our plight. At the risk of having to say no when dealing with a grumpy child who doesn’t really want to eat vegetables or a piece of chicken or a bowl of fruit salad, we’ve just given up and are quick to offer the fast alternative.

Treats have become part of our diet. Indeed, we’ve made fast food “the other choice”. We give our children those treats on the way home from school, by heading to the local drive-through, and shut them up with a large order of fries and a jumbo, bladder-busting, sugar-laden soda. We are such wimps, we do this almost every day of the week. It’s easier than providing a decent after school snack. It’s quicker than washing the apples, peeling the carrots and rinsing the celery sticks. Weekends aren’t any better, and have become another excuse for eating fast food. We pile the kids into the van and drop by the local fast food joint for lunch, dinner and snacks after hockey, soccer, dance, music—you name it. The benefits of a couple of hours of weekend hockey, soccer or dance are wiped out in five minutes. And, to our dismay, the more we eat like this, the more we crave it.

Ya, let’s just stop slagging the fast food industry and have a good look at who the real culprit is. Who gets behind that wheel and “drives through”. It isn’t Wendy or Ronald and it sure as hell isn’t Timmie.

theresa@wellingtontimes.ca