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Continuing with the scenario: Easy fast food has contributed to the obesity epidemic, factory farming conditions, eviction of families from farms to corporation

Continuing with the scenario: Easy fast food has contributed to the obesity epidemic, factory farming conditions, eviction of families from farms to corporations can take them over, and environmental disasters that contribute to global warming. The absence of fast food places is a benefit to a sustainable society.

atonse 5y ago
How much of that is “fast food” and how much of that is just “feeding billions of people a lot of meat”? What would happen if easy fast food went away? I suppose people wouldn’t eat the same quantities of food? So the farming requirements wouldn’t change.
- egypturnash 5y ago
  If easy fast food went away then the working poor would have to find time, money, and energy to source their own ingredients, keep them fresh, and cook them. Which is a tall order when you're already stretched to the breaking point working three shitty part-time jobs with ever-shifting hours. A lot of the people in that situation live in places with nothing but fast food in a reasonable distance, too. Slower restaurants aren't an option - they take far more time and money then people in this situation have. I don't know what percentage of those shitty part-time jobs are fast food, but all of those jobs are gone along with the places if we imagine snapping our fingers and decreeing No More Fast Food. Some might be substituted by increased demand at grocers? I feel like one possible result is former fast food workers who do find some measure of fulfillment in the job of "feeding people" pooling their resources and creating some kind of neighborhood co-op kitchen that feeds their community, with a very different allocation of the money brought in by people paying for the food - more towards paying the workers and getting good ingedients than to increasing shareholder returns. Someone's probably gonna try to get rich off of doing this too of course. Depending on what kinds of resources they can acquire there might be a shift towards purchasing food from more local farmers, or even growing some crops themselves. That's my first guesses, at least.
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    Or you could look at what people did 100 years ago before fast food. I suppose you typically had one partner that was not employed and could cook, a bachelor might live with his parents, or a boarding house where meals were cooked.
    - egypturnash 5y ago
      These work too! Well aside from the fact that paying rent on one person’s salary is nigh-impossible these days.

atonse 5y ago

How much of that is “fast food” and how much of that is just “feeding billions of people a lot of meat”? What would happen if easy fast food went away? I suppose people wouldn’t eat the same quantities of food? So the farming requirements wouldn’t change.

egypturnash 5y ago
If easy fast food went away then the working poor would have to find time, money, and energy to source their own ingredients, keep them fresh, and cook them. Which is a tall order when you're already stretched to the breaking point working three shitty part-time jobs with ever-shifting hours. A lot of the people in that situation live in places with nothing but fast food in a reasonable distance, too. Slower restaurants aren't an option - they take far more time and money then people in this situation have. I don't know what percentage of those shitty part-time jobs are fast food, but all of those jobs are gone along with the places if we imagine snapping our fingers and decreeing No More Fast Food. Some might be substituted by increased demand at grocers? I feel like one possible result is former fast food workers who do find some measure of fulfillment in the job of "feeding people" pooling their resources and creating some kind of neighborhood co-op kitchen that feeds their community, with a very different allocation of the money brought in by people paying for the food - more towards paying the workers and getting good ingedients than to increasing shareholder returns. Someone's probably gonna try to get rich off of doing this too of course. Depending on what kinds of resources they can acquire there might be a shift towards purchasing food from more local farmers, or even growing some crops themselves. That's my first guesses, at least.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  Or you could look at what people did 100 years ago before fast food. I suppose you typically had one partner that was not employed and could cook, a bachelor might live with his parents, or a boarding house where meals were cooked.
  - egypturnash 5y ago
    These work too! Well aside from the fact that paying rent on one person’s salary is nigh-impossible these days.