[Tyr Zalo Hawk]: 712.Essays.Reality vs FFF.Fooled Into Fast Food.D1

Statistically speaking, one out of every four people who read this will eat fast food today1. However, only 1 in every 100 people who eats the fast food will actually know anything about their food besides its price and taste. So why buy food that you don’t know anything about? For the same reasons you get in your car, interact with other people, and even go to class. You believe that these things are safe, or at least safe enough to take part in. You assume a certain confidence in how the products you use are manufactured. Hell, most people don’t even glance at an ingredient list unless they’ve heard a rumor about how a certain dye shrinks their sperm count, or they have food allergies. Most people base their food consumption largely on assumptions and beliefs, not scientific fact.
      The human mind has the singularly incredible ability to completely ignore reality if it so desires. This doesn’t, of course, change reality for anyone except the person whose mind has decided to do so. The brain functions by interpreting signals given to it by the rest of the body; this causes neurons to fire, and then an appropriate response in sent back to the body in one form or another. As even a magician can tell you though, the mind is easily fooled. Placebos are usually thought of as sugar pills, given by doctors to patients who believe enough in the effects of medicine to make these ordinary little capsules have the same effect as sleeping meds, pain pills, and even certain psychiatric medications. People take the pills thinking they are real medications and their minds, thinking the same, act according to what it is they believe that pill is doing to their bodies. Random clinical testing for depression treatments showed that a placebo worked just as well as actual therapy and powerful drugs in nearly every case (Brown). The placebo effect has also been illustrated in foods, for example “Brightly colored foods frequently seem to taste better than bland-looking foods, even when the flavor compounds are identical” (FFN pg 125). Put simply, it doesn’t really matter what it is that we’re eating, just so long as we believe it is that something.
People, in general, tend to be open-minded until they get used to things, at which point any change in their routine or tradition becomes rather noticeable. For some, this simply means that they like a particular band’s cover of the same song or the way mom makes her chicken in comparison to everyone else. With such narrow minds to deal with, the fast food industry has to be careful about how much they let the people know. What they don’t know about the changes in their food won’t affect them, because they still think it’s exactly the same. When McDonald’s switched from it’s process of using fresh potatoes for French fries to the frozen fries of J.R. Simplot, people couldn’t taste the difference. As far as anyone knew, they were getting the same fries, for a better price (FFN 115). Scientists in the 1970s tested and proved that a foods color was a large factor in how people perceived the taste. In the experiment “people were served an oddly tinted meal of steak and French fries that appeared normal beneath colored lights. Everyone thought the meal tasted fine until the lighting was changed… [then] some people became ill” (FFN 125). The same thing these people had eaten a few moments before and enjoyed was suddenly more like a poison just because of a color change. Their minds saw something they didn’t recognize as right, and everything flipped upside down, which also explains the nausea.
Many complex ingredients are used to make our everyday foods. Sodium benzoate, acesulfame potassium and hundreds of other chemicals can be found in all of the food groups. To many, the majority of these ingredients are no more than polysyllabic words with little value in the real world, but the truth is obviously quite different. Each of these substances has a varied effect from causing allergic reactions to boosting immune systems, preserving the food longer, and can also contribute to taste, odor, and color. Fast food, including hamburgers, is mainly flavored by these chemicals and not by natural means, as most would assume. Of course, no fast food giant is ever going to openly state that the flavor of their food is produced a thousand miles away, because people are more likely to buy if they associate the taste of the meal with the place they purchased it at. In Fast Food Nation, Schlosser explores a factory that produces the chemicals used to make a food taste like it does. “All of these aromas are made through the same basic process: the manipulation of volatile chemicals to create a particular aroma” (FFN 122). Because our sense of taste is actually 90% smell, a particular aroma, added to anything, could easily make even the most delicious of foods taste horrible, and visa versa.
Through observation of things is gained a supposed knowledge of those things. This knowledge dictates belief, and this belief dictates personal realities. Personal realities don’t need to be grounded in comprehensive knowledge of an ingredient list, on finding that a sugar pill has cured a sickness, or even on the knowledge that something has changed in some small way. The personal reality is whatever the individual thinks it is – actual reality be damned