Fast Food Restaurant - Criticisms

Criticisms

The fast food industry is a popular target for critics, from anti-globalization activists like José Bové to vegetarian activist groups such as PETA.

In his best-selling 2001 book Fast Food Nation, investigative journalist Eric Schlosser leveled a broad, socioeconomic critique against the fast food industry, documenting how fast food rose from small, family-run businesses (like the McDonald brothers' burger joint) into large, multinational corporate juggernauts whose economies of scale radically transformed agriculture, meat processing, and labor markets in the late twentieth century. While the innovations of the fast food industry gave Americans more and cheaper dining options, it has come at the price of destroying the environment, economy, and small-town communities of rural America while shielding consumers from the real costs of their convenient meal, both in terms of health and the broader impact of large-scale food production and processing on workers, animals, and land.

The fast food industry is popular in the United States, the source of most of its innovation, and many major international chains are based there. Seen as symbols of U.S. dominance and perceived cultural imperialism, American fast food franchises have often been the target of Anti-globalization protests and demonstrations against the U.S. government. In 2005, for example, rioters in Karachi, Pakistan, who were initially angered because of the bombing of a Shiite mosque, destroyed a KFC restaurant.