Fast Food for Everyone!

In conjunction with Soc 155, I'm also taking a class on Social Inequality in Health Care, Soc 166. Of all the topics that interested me the most from this class, it was the issue of obesity. In America, areas of extensive poverty often times have a high rate of obesity and other health issues. This is due to the fact that people from lower classes can only afford to eat food that is cheap and comes in large quantities, aka junk food.

In higher class societies, there is often more of a need to be skinny whereas in lower class neighborhoods body image does not seem to be a big issue. I began to notice this issue first when I was in a summer program at a college in Massachusetts my junior year of high school. In this particular discussion we focused on body image issues that affect young girls of present day America. My fellow classmates had a lot to contribute. They were mostly from predominately affluent neighborhoods, and talked about the need to be skinny where they are from. They feel a pressure to order salads with no dressing, drink nothing but water, and exercise so much so that they're legs do not touch. I commented on how this was not an issue we have where I come from. No one was ever pressured to be skinny, at least not to my knowledge.

In Oakland, basically around every corner, I can find a McDonald, which would always be across the street from Burger Kings, and then at the side street there would be a KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken). The abundance of fast food restaurants that was available to choose from was sometimes overwhelming, it made making a decision on which type of greasy, unhealthy food to buy, extremely hard. Eating healthy certainly is not the first thing in anyone's mind when there is so much cheap yet filling food to choose from to feed one's family. It makes sense that obesity and other health problems affect areas of lower class people.

Another thing is, although I understand it's better not to eat such unhealthy food, I also think that McDonalds and all those other fast food restaurants taste better than some healthier options. If it is more filling and tastier, then why not eat it? As is mentioned in Lecture 18: Accounting for Taste, "the realities of economic necessity means that tastes of LCCs are organized around that which is functional or practical—the "taste for necessity."