Fast food vs. home cooked food

Fast food vs. Home cooked food Being green is not just a trend; it is a path to be healthy and longevity. In this age of competition, individuals arebusy in their professional lives. Since fast foods are ready anytime and anywhere, more people get them to allay their hunger in their fully occupied schedules. Nevertheless, fast food has proven to be unhealthy, which leads numerous harmful disorders such as heart disease, cholesterol, blood pressure, and obesity. As a result, people are craving for home cooked food again. Having home cooked food can help people to create healthy eating habits and build up a healthier life. Fast food offers convenience and other advantages over home cooked food but the benefits of home cooked food and the disadvantages of fast foods identifies the need for consumption of homemade foods. This paper argues for preference of homemade foods from these perspectives.
Time is considered a factor that influences the eating habits of an individual. Fast food is described as food ingredients that are prepared and served very quickly. Because of this, it enhances the profitability of fast food chains. ‘ Fast’ is the crucial point and it can be seen by mathematical approach. Usually people walk into or drive thru a nearby fast food restaurant that needs five to ten minutes. It takes around five minutes to order and get a hamburger, depends on the length of the queue. A hamburger from fast food restaurant just takes fifteen minutes for maximum. On the other hand, a home cooked hamburger takes extra time for preparation from raw ingredients. First, a person needs to go to grocery store to purchase the raw ingredients, which usually takes fifteen to twenty minutes. Next, raw ingredients like onions and ground meat need to be cut and flavored that takes around ten minutes. The cooking process needs ten more minutes. A home cooked hamburger takes more than thirty minutes in total. Even Jamie Oliver can only create a fifteen minutes fast recipe. Due to a huge workload of urban people, they would prefer to use less time to get the similar food, so the dependency of the consumers over fast food is high in the entire globe. Undoubtedly fast food is fast, but it is not the best food option.
Since fast food meal is convenient, people may misunderstand that the cost of fast food meal is cheaper; however, it is not. Take a Quarter Pounder with cheese hamburger at McDonalds as an example. A Quarter Pounder with cheese hamburger costs $3. 91. According to the official McDonald website, the beef patty inside is 2. 9oz. The average price of the ground meat from Vons and Trader Joes, 2. 9oz ground meat costs around $0. 99. A bun costs $0. 21; the cheese and onion costs $0. 25 and the rest condiments cost around $0. 05. In total, a home cooked hamburger only cost $1. 50. It can be proven that costs of home cooked food are lower than fast food through this calculation. An individual can save $2. 41 if he or she makes a hamburger rather than buy one. If an individual buy hamburger in a fast food restaurant for a long term, it has no benefit to his or her wallet. Eating fast food is not an economical method of living because it is not worthy to get low nutrient food with higher costs. But home cooked food can offer better nutrition with lower costs.
Cost and timing may be the outside factors that are not important to some consumers; however, the healthiness must be a major concern. Serving size is a significant factor to make people eating home cooked food. In a fast food restaurant, a huge quantity of food is served to an individual. A huge quantity of food may act as a cause of overweight or obesity. The author did a research in the same McDonald restaurant for three days. By asking three questions, she discovered that seventy percent of the interviewees stated that they felt full when they ate one hamburger and half of the French Fries. However, ninety percent of them could or tried to finish the whole meal. Interviewees actually ate more than they needed or wanted. A man needs to intake about 2, 800 calories per day when a woman just needs about 1, 600 calories (Duyff 213). For example, a hamburger meal from McDonalds, which includes one hamburger, one medium size French fries and soft drinks, carries 1045 calories on average. The calories of one McDonalds meal are half of woman’s need or one third of man’s need a day. If those interviewees keep eating this type of fast food for a period of time, they actually intakes more calories than they need. The extra calories will transform to fats, and extra fats may lead to obesity. If the consumers cannot finish the meal and choose to throw them away, it leads another problem about wasting food. However, this situation can be avoided if they are able to cook at home. Individuals can control the size of the meal according to their appetite. They also decrease the opportunity to take extra calories.
Hamburger Calories Fat Dietary Fiber
Sodium
McDonalds 520 26g 3g 1100mg
Homemade 409 24g 8g 434mg
People also need to pay attention to the nutrient value in their meal to retain a good health. From the above table, it shows that the nutritive value of home cooked hamburgers is better than McDonalds hamburgers. A homemade hamburger has less, fat and sodium, which are the substances that human bodies need less. Nevertheless, dietary fiber is a good substance for human bodies, which can help gastrointestinal motility and absorb harmful substance in intestine. People are better to eat food with abundant dietary fiber. If people eat home cooked food, they can prepare with fresh ingredients and accurate method to make it tastier and healthier. People can purchase a nutrient guide to help themselves choosing the right food to eat. For examples, people can use low fat ground meat, 2%fat milk cheese, high fiber bread and low sodium condiments for their meals. Also, home cooked food can be delicious by using natural flavoring such as fresh herbs, black pepper, lemon and garlic. For example, Jamie Oliver, the British home cooking promoter, designed some recipes to use natural flavoring to improve the tastiness of food. He uses red chili, garlic, cumin seeds and cinnamon rather than Tapatio (hot sauce) or MSG (Monosodium glutamate) (Oliver, 26-27). There is no denying that an individual is able to maintain the freshness of food easily.
Conversely, fast food is tasty but the flavoring inside is usually MSG (Monosodium glutamate), which is a chemical flavor enhancer and harmful to human bodies. Also, fast food restaurants add different condiments such as mayonnaise, ketup and barbecue sauce, which contains vary color pigment and chemicals, to make the food more palatable and attract more consumers. They use trans fat to fry potato fries to make them more crispy and delicious (Zinczenko 8). Furthermore, food served in fast food restaurants are premade or preheated. Before selling them to consumers, the waiter will reheat the food. When the ingredients are cooked, the nutrition inside would loss a bit. If the foods keep reheated, the foods lose most of the nutrition basically. Moreover the foods easily propagate bacteria if they stay at a room temperature again and again. Eating spoiled food can lead serious injury to human bodies. Therefore fast food almost has no nutrient value, and with numerous chemicals that is detrimental to health.
Conclusion
The debate on homemade foods and fast foods identifies advantages and disadvantages of each type of food but rationale shows greater net benefits in homemade foods. Time and convenience are the major factors to preference for fast foods because they are readily available in inns and restaurant as compared to homemade foods that an individual has to take time to prepare. These may have secondary benefits such as utility of saved time in other activities such as economic ventures but the long-term effects of fast food are their major limitations. One of the limitations of fast food is their cost that is higher than the cost of homemade food, though the unit costs make the fast foods appear cheap. Fast food may also influence over eating as an individual strives to finish served food, leading to overweight, while in homemade food, an individual servers appropriate quantity. Fast foods also have high levels of calories that is harmful to people’s health and leads to overweight or obesity. In addition, fast foods have low nutritional values as compared with foods that are prepared at home. Even though fast foods offer time and convenience benefits, its limitations, relative to homemade foods, such as cost, poor nutritional value, and high level of calories establishes higher utility from home made food. The paper therefore argues that homemade food is better than fast foods.