Fast Food Topics

• cornish pasties
• fast food restaurants
• billy ingram
• merriam webster
• upscale atmosphere
• hamburger chain
• fish and chips
• chicken nuggets
• casual restaurants
• quality preparation
• food operations
• plastic wrapping
• walter anderson
• french fries
• food outlet
• consistent level
• hot dogs
• food outlets
• five cents
• white castle

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Fast Food, Fast Food

While any meal with low preparation time can be considered to be fast food, typically the term refers to food sold in a restaurant or store with low quality preparation and served to the customer in a packaged form for take-out/take-away. The term "fast food" was recognized in a dictionary by Merriam-Webster in 1951.

Smaller, individually-owned fast food restaurants are becoming much more common throughout the world. Restaurants with much higher sit-in ratios, where customers tend to sit and have their orders brought to them in a seemingly more upscale atmosphere, are known as fast casual restaurants.

Local pubs and taverns were also providers of 'rapid' if not fast food. As well as these fixed outlets, stalls selling cooked food were quite common. Cornish pasties and their descendants go back at least as far as the 13th century.

The American company White Castle, founded in 1921 by Billy Ingram and Walter Anderson in Wichita, Kansas in 1921, is generally credited with opening the second fast food outlet and first hamburger chain, selling hamburgers for five cents apiece.

Common menu items at fast food outlets include fish and chips, sandwiches, pitas, hamburgers, fried chicken, french fries, chicken nuggets, tacos, pizza, hot dogs, and ice cream, although many fast food restaurants offer "slower" foods like chili, mashed potatoes, and salads.

It is usually rapidly served in cartons or bags or in a plastic wrapping, in a fashion which minimizes cost. In most fast food operations, menu items are generally made from processed ingredients prepared at a central supply facility and then shipped to individual outlets where they are reheated, cooked (usually by microwave or deep frying) or assembled in a short amount of time. This process ensures a consistent level of product quality, and is key to being able to deliver the order quickly to the customer and eliminate labor and equipment costs in the individual stores.

Fast food has been losing market share to so-called fast casual dining restaurants, which offer more robust and expensive cuisines.

A 2006 study Why fast foods are bad, even in moderation fed monkeys a diet consisting of a similar level of trans fats as what a person who ate fast food regularly would consume. Both diets contained the same overall number of calories. It was found that the monkeys who consumed higher level of trans fat developed more abdominal fat than those fed a diet rich in unsaturated fats. They also developed signs of insulin resistance, which is an early indicator of diabetes. After six years on the diet, the trans fat fed monkeys had gained 7.2% of their body weight, compared to just 1.8% in the unsaturated fat group.

Source: Wikipedia > Fast Food