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Fast Food Manipulation Essay

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Over 45 million people have gone to eat at various Fast Food restaurants such as Burger King and McDonalds. Americans have depended on Fast Food restaurants for around 6 decades, whenever they want something quick and delicious to eat. According to the Centers for Disease Control, “one in five American adults [are] obese or classified as obese; while thirty percent of children in the U.S. are suffering from obesity”. This is astounding due to the fact that many ingredients in fast food such as Sodium Benzoate, Sodium Nitrate, and High Fructose Corn Syrup have been shown by studies to cause diabetes, cancer, and many other diseases. The Fast Food Industry, because of the aforementioned problems with obesity and diseases along with how the Fast …show more content…

The answer to that question is through manipulation. The Fast Food Industry manipulates their consumers through advertisements, specifically towards children. Advertisements run abound in American television, with commercials being broadcasted every 8-10 minutes. For a 30 minute show, this means commercials can come on twice to three times a show. Children are the main targets for manipulation because according to Schlosser (2001) “‘A child who loves our TV commercials,’ Kroc explained, ‘and brings her grandparents to a McDonald’s gives us two more customers’” (p. 156). The Fast Food Industry, and many other companies, found that kids are easiest to manipulate because of their young minds, and that when they target children, they have a high probability of getting the rest of the family. This makes sense because parents are almost always listening to their children, sometimes basing the entire meal around what the children wants. Schlosser (2001) explains “a person’s ‘brand loyalty’ may begin as early as the age of two [...] children recognize a brand logo before they can recognize their own name” (p. 158). We can infer from this that when children grow up, they’ll forever be slaves to the Fast Food restaurant they grew up with, and will start a perpetual cycle of bringing their children to their …show more content…

The negative side is that the Fast Food Industry is enabling obesity and diseases to affect their consumers while also manipulating consumers to eat their foods, which starts a never-ending cycle of consumerism and disease. However, there is no doubt that the Fast Food Industry also enables economic mobility for millions of Americans because of the many job opportunities and upward mobility employees can receive. It’s hard to say if the positive outweighs the negative, but one could argue that the negative does outweigh the positive and we must do something to change the positives that the Fast Food industry currently

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