Fast food

Fast food is food prepared and served quickly at a fast-food restaurant or shop at low cost. Fast food is a multi-billion dollar industry which is continuing to grow at a rapid pace in the early 21st century in many countries as fewer people cook at home.

Changes

A need to limit the fast food approach is increasingly being perceived in the early years of the 21st Century. Some of the concerns have led to a Slow Food reaction. This movement seeks to preserve local cuisines and ingredients, and directly opposes laws and habits that favor fast-food choices. Among other things, it strives to educate consumers' palates to prefer what it says are the richer, more varied and more nourishing tastes of fresh local ingredients harvested in season.

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Some of the large fast food chains are beginning to incorporate healthier alternatives in their menu, e.g. salads and fresh fruit. However, some people are cynical about this, seeing it as a tokenistic and commercial measure, rather than an appropriate reaction to genuine worries about the world ecology and people's health. For their part, fast food restaurants make no secret of the fact that their change in menu is not out of idealism, but rather because of the trend in the early 21st century's developed world toward increased health consciousness. In particular, restaurants want to add some healthy choices because of the veto effect in which one person in a group interested in healthy eating causes the group not to go to the restaurant.

Related Topics:
Ecology - Health - 21st century - Health consciousness

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