Ronald McDonald's Lap

            Do you know where your food comes from? While you’re sipping your preppy little no-whip soy latte, and munching on “organic” whole-grain muffins, take a second to consider what you’re really consuming. Behind the standardized shelves of your local Wal-Mart, what really makes up the basis of the stuff you put into your mouth on a daily basis?

            We all know about the alarming obesity epidemic in the United States. About how kids and teens are turning into fat tubs of lard, and how there are more children with diabetes today than there are selfies of white girls making duck faces on Instagram. The main cause for this overwhelming rise in the obesity of our youth is none other than the fast food industries, which have taken over every damn nook and cranny of our previously untarnished society, and completely exploited the food industry. Nowadays you can’t even walk a block in the average neighborhood without seeing the blazing neon lights of your local McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Arby’s or Pizza Hut beckoning you to come on in and sample its newest burger, sub, or pizza topping- at a cost of 800 calories and multiple coronary blockages of course.

            In our hectic 21st century lives, we rarely stop to think about what goes into these seemingly delicious but health-detrimental foods. Surprise: it's most likely not the "farm fresh ingredients" advertised on the gigantic full color billboards. I'm definitely not an expert on the subject (thank god, what an awful and terrifying profession that would be), but what scares me the most is that there could literally be anything in the fast food that we eat and we wouldn't know it. Anything. And we wouldn't have a fucking clue! How are we supposed to know if there's roadkill in our take-out chili or silly putty in our cheese-stuffed crust? We don't know. We'll never know. And for some reason we're more than willing to take a backseat and greedily devour hamburgers by the ton. 

            But really it isn’t all that surprising that so many people today turn to these high-carb, high-fat, high-calorie, high-everything foods for their main source of nutrition. It seems so much cheaper to purchase a burger off the dollar menu than it is does to buy just a few apples of oranges for the same price. But this is the exact mentality that aids in the transformation of an overweight society. Realistically, it really isn't that difficult to eat healthful foods on a budget. Substitute a salad for fries, lay off the pie for the night, and give up your one-liter-coke-per-day habits for god's sake. "Fast food" should realistically be better known as "slow food", seeing the effect that it's having on the ability of our population to get off of Ronald McDonald's lap and attempt to actually be fast. 

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