“We don’t need a law against McDonald’s or a law against slaughterhouse abuse–we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse.” ― Joel Salatin
Is fast food good food? Few would argue that it is. And yet we eat tons of it.
“A generation ago, three-quarters of the money used to buy food in the United States was spent to prepare meals at home. Today about half of the money used to buy food is spent at restaurants–mainly at fast food restaurants.” ― Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
In our fast-paced affluent society, eating has become a task to be accomplished without slowing us down anymore than is necessary, and fast food makes slowing down unnecessary. But the means necessary to gain this fast feast are not always good for us, the earth, or animals. Many today are noting that there are social, cultural, economic, and spiritual effects to our fast food penchants, as well as the obvious health concerns. The following news video highlights some of fast food’s health issues, while the article that follows demonstrates the economic myths involved with the fast food industry.
—
Fast Food Versus Slow Food
By Nancy Folbre (Source) | Never before have so many Americans watched so many entertaining cooking shows on television and enjoyed so much excellent food writing. Never before have so many spent so little time cooking food.
This paradox of modern life invites consideration of some of the good old-fashioned home economics pioneered by the economists Margaret Reid and Hazel Kyrk in the 1930s. Both predicted that the increasing value of time and powerful economies of scale would lead to increased substitution of market purchases for home-produced goods and services. Both also warned of limits to such substitutability.
Neither foresaw the extent to which the traditional housewife would be simultaneously liberated from and rendered obsolete in the kitchen. Average time per day devoted to cooking declined by 30 minutes between 1965 and 2007-08, a span of time for which detailed survey data are available.
Purchases of food away from home, expanding to 49 percent in 2011 from about 30 percent of all food dollars in 1965, and were a driving force behind this trend.
Also important was a shift toward purchases of prepared food, adding a range of choices such as frozen Asian cuisine to the classic TV dinner.
New household gadgets, including the now ubiquitous microwave oven, made it easier to defrost and reheat prepared foods. Indeed, the word “cooking” itself has become anachronistic. The American Time Use Survey first administered in 2003 categorizes the activity in broader, more generic terms as “food preparation and cleanup.” In 2012, only 40 percent of men and 65 percent of women ages 15 and over engaged in that activity a day. On average, men spent 0.7 hours on food preparation and cleanup while women spent 1.2 hours on it.
In other words, women still do far more of it than men, but it consumes a relatively small portion of their total work day.
Changes in the relative productivity of paid and unpaid work were a driving force behind this transformation. As women’s opportunities for employment outside the home grew, the opportunity cost of their time increased. As it became cheaper to purchase than to prepare food, women could contribute more to family living standards by finding paid employment.
Declining household size – and a growing tendency for people to live alone – also increased the relative cost of home cooking, because it reduced economies of scale in home food preparation.
By way of making this argument less abstract, a University of Massachusetts student and I conducted a small experiment. We compared the cost of buying a premium cheeseburger at a local fast-food restaurant with the cost of buying the ingredients and cooking one in my kitchen, including the cost of the time devoted to purchase and cleanup.
We chose cheeseburgers for this experiment because a lot of people eat them, we know how to cook them and it’s easy to match the ingredients in order to create a comparable product. (Our intent is not to encourage cheeseburger consumption or to deprecate veggie burgers).
Rather than assuming an hourly wage to measure the value of food preparation time, we asked what hourly wage would equalize the price of a manufactured versus a home-produced cheeseburger. Anyone who values their time more than this hourly wage is likely to find the manufactured burger more cost-effective.
The purchased burger cost about $4 (not including taxes). The cost of ingredients for a comparable burger came to about $1. Shopping time (counting time only from the front of the grocery store to collection of the specific ingredients) came to about seven minutes. Putting food away and setting out materials required 10 minutes. Actual cooking time came to about eight minutes and cleanup time to five, for a total of 30 minutes.
So, cooking one cheeseburger at home saved about $3 but required 30 minutes of work. Ignoring taxes, small differences in quality, convenience, waiting time at the restaurant, the cost of household utilities, environmental impact, social consequences and human feelings, this implies a break-even wage of about $6 an hour, below the federal minimum wage.
But this calculation changes radically with the number of burgers cooked, because there are significant economies of scale in home cooking. It takes almost the same amount of time to prepare four cheeseburgers as one – about 32 minutes (shopping time and cooking time remain unchanged; setup and cleanup time increase slightly).
The difference in the price of four purchased burgers ($16) and ingredients ($4) for four home-produced ones is $12, which, with 32 minutes preparation time, implies a break-even wage of about $22.50 an hour, still less than my academic salary but a far greater reward for cooking than $6 an hour.
This experiment, however anecdotal, illustrates three important points. First, efforts to encourage people to cook more nutritious and delicious meals at home need to take the value of time into account, which they haven’t always done in the past. This issue also comes up in criticisms of public food assistance programs that assume low-income families always have sufficient time to cook food “from scratch.”
Second, people who cook for one another – whether family or friends – on a regular basis are likely to realize more significant economic benefits than those who cook alone, because there are significant economies of scale in food preparation at home.
Finally, and most importantly, the measurement of “cost-effectiveness” depends which effects you care most about. As the Reid-Kyrk studies emphasized, it’s easier to calculate relative costs per unit consumed than to estimate more indirect, long-run effects on physical and social health.
They believed that household production would continue to play an important economic role because of its contributions to the quality of family and community life. That causality runs both ways.
