"The Fast Food Nation" and Sustainability

Two years ago, I took a class on the foundation of community health. Professor asked us to do an “food interview” with someone and asked them how the food they eat relates to their culture. I heard many good stories from those interviews, people share the different experiences about how the food ties up their early childhood or memories of family. But most of them are the first or second generation of immigrants who are from a different culture. When I asked about what do they think about American food, their answers are the same: That’s all fast food.

So I watched the first video listed on “sustainable food documentary list”—<The fast food nation>. The movie came out in 2006 and talked about how a burger company named “Mickey” trying to figure out why their meat is tested to be polluted by E.coli bacteria.

One thing I found very interesting in this movie is that the fast food companies don’t just symbolize the “American Food” style, but also relates to how illegal Mexican workers get job opportunities and these untrained workers create food security problems in the U.S… After they figure out that probably the Machine goes too fast that leaves no time for workers to do their work adequately. The farmer replies by saying that “Machine is taking over the country. Land, cattle, human beings, these machines don’t give a shit… All they care about is money”. Yes, the problem always comes back to “Money versus sustainability".

We all know that fast food is not healthy, but it creates a huge job markets and a food “culture”. People buy it and eat it, people get jobs on it, people throw themselves into an unhealthy life style because of it. Even though beef costs a lot of water to produce and couldn’t be considered as sustainable food, there still a lot of people buy it from burger places. Not just because they are not well informed, but also because the price of the fast food market is cheap. It comes to the point that, the link between healthy food and fast food is how much does it cost.

But, the link between healthy food and sustainable food doesn’t be revealed very well from the film. Personally, I think sustainable food is defined by how easily you can access to that food considering production, processing, and transportations, buying local products is always good and sustainable. And among those options, healthy food is based on how much nutritions each person needs daily.

Talking about sustainable food and health food, I feel that’s kind of a prioritize for people living in a developed country. I traveled to Africa once when I was in high school. I saw that the people living there don’t even think about the term “healthy” or “sustainable”. They just eat whatever they get or have access to. As a Chinese, I’ve also never heard people discussing these ideas in China. Probably because the fast food is not a part of Chinese food culture, the majority of Chinese dishes are healthy, just like other Asian country’s dishes. But being in American, thinking about sustainable when choosing healthy diet is always a good choice for the Earth.