1. Marketing
1.1. Companies solely care about making money, not about their customers
1.1.1. "Workers at the counter are told to increase the size of an order by recommending special promotions, pushing dessert, pointing out the financial logic behind the purchase of a larger drink." (pp.30)
1.2. Fast food companies aim to make a lasting impression
1.2.1. The food you eat in the first few years of your life is what you will grow to like as you grow older. That is why childhood memories of Happy Meals can turn into multiple visits to McDonalds a week as an adult (pp. 48)
1.3. Advertising is not only for the now, its for the long run
1.3.1. McDonald's spends more money on advertising than any other brand. It operates more playgrounds than any other private entity in the U.S. It is one of the nation's largest distributors of toys. In a survey involving schoolchildren, 96% could identify Ronald McDonald, with the only fictional character more recognized being Santa Claus himself. "The Golden Arches are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross (pp. 10) This links directly to the point above, as these children will be spending their money at McDonald's in 15-20 years time.
1.4. Children are the main targets for everything
1.4.1. Ray Kroc, the man who purchased McDonald's in 1961, valued promoting food just as much as making it taste good. His philosophy was "A child who loves our TV commercials and brings her grandparents to a MCDonald's gives us two more customers" (pp. 21)
2. Politics
2.1. Longer hours create problems in kids
2.1.1. Teenagers who work longer hours are more likely to commit crimes and develop substance abuse (pp. 33)
2.2. Fast food restaurants are appealing to criminals
2.2.1. While most retail businesses are working hard to make the majority of their transactions digital, fast food restaurants still mainly take cash, and usually have tens of thousands available for robbers to take (pp. 35)
2.3. Animals are unethically exploited for their meat
2.3.1. Tyson was one of the nation’s leading chicken processors, and it soon developed a new breed of chicken to facilitate the production of McNuggets, which had unusually large breasts (pp. 53) They go to the farm on the first day of their lives and don't leave until they are killed, and are mass fed unhealthy and damaging foods that only benefit the human that eats them (pp. 54)
2.4. The industry unethically destroyed the lives of many workers, who had no other option.
2.4.1. Kenny Dobbins was a man who worked for Monfort for 16 years. After hurting his back catching a flying projectile, he eventually figured out he had severely herniated disks, although Monfort tried telling him he pulled his muscle. He had surgery, and physical therapy didn't work, he lost his wife due to stress and financial problems, yet still returned to the company because he felt loyalty. Since then, he has had his lungs burned by chemicals, been hit by a train, saved a workers' life, broke his leg, broke his ankle, and had a heart attack, all because of Monfort. Once they realized Kenny was too broken to work hard, they fired him and threw him to the curb like a piece of trash. Kenny's entire life got ruined working for this company and now at just 46, he has no job, no well-working body parts, and only received a settlement of $35,000 for all of it (pp. 69)
3. Health
3.1. The food is produced and cooked in extremely unhealthy ways
3.1.1. McDonald’s cooked its french fries in a mixture of about 7 percent cottonseed oil and 93 percent beef tallow.; it had more saturated beef fat per ounce than a McDonald’s hamburger (pp. 47)
3.2. The flavor industry is sketchy
3.2.1. The leading companies will not divulge the precise formulas of flavor compounds or the identities of clients. Moreso, McDonald's lists "natural flavor" as an ingredient in its French Fries, almost certainly not wanting to actually reveal what it is (pp. 47)
3.3. Almost everything you eat has flavor additives that are harmful for you body
3.3.1. By the mid-1960s the American flavor industry was churning out compounds to supply the taste of Pop Tarts, Bac-Os, Tab,Tang, Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, and literally thousands of other new foods (pp. 48)
3.4. Uncareful meat companies can cause mass death
3.4.1. Hudson Foods had 35 million pounds of ground beef recalled in 1997 after a massive E. coli 0157:H7 outbreak. By the time it was recalled, over 25 million pounds of it were already eaten (pp. 70)
3.5. The food industry is still today not safe or good enough, which is simply unacceptable
3.5.1. Every day in the United States, over 200,000 people are sickened by bad food, 900 are hospitalized, and 14 die. The CDC believes that at least 1 in 4 people get food poisoning each year (pp. 71)
4. Labor
4.1. cheap, intense, repetitive labor
4.1.1. The industrialization of the restaurant kitchen has enabled the fast food chains to rely upon a low-paid and unskilled workforce (pp. 10)
4.2. Lots of cheap workers
4.2.1. The roughly 3.5 million fast food workers are by far the largest group of minimum wage earners in the United States (pp. 10)
4.3. Most of them are teenagers
4.3.1. They seek out part-time, unskilled works who are willing to accept cheap pay (2/3 of fast food workers are under 20) (pp. 30)
4.4. Slaughterhouse labor is not only dangerous, but vile and nauseating too.
4.4.1. Workers have a large knife in one hand and a steel hook in the other, and grab and attack the meat with both. A "sticker" spends over 8 hours standing in a river of blood, slitting the neck of young cows every ten seconds. That is almost 3000 cows per day (pp. 64)
4.5. Slaughterhouse cleaning is seen as the worst job in the US
4.5.1. "It takes a really dedicated or really desperate person to get the job done," a former cleaning crew member claimed. The carcasses and blood of 3 to 4 thousand cattle lay there, with the place having to be clean by sunrise. Their main tool is a high-pressure hose that shoots a mixture of water and chlorine. They are hot, wet, smelly, and have to clean every nook and cranny of the place which is covered in grease, fat, blood, manure, and leftover scraps of meat (pp. 65)