How Do Fast Food Restaurants Make Fast Food?

They make it fast, of course!

Fast food restaurants are complicated places. Take a typical menu: Burger, fries and a fruit flavoured milkshake. All you really need to make this menu in your home is beef, potatoes, some oil, milk, ice cream, and fruit. That seems to be six ingredients. But this is not the way fast food restaurants like to do things. A fast food restaurant is much more like a science lab than a kitchen. Here are some of the strange and frankly scary things that go on in nearly every fast food restaurant you will ever visit.

Hamburgers

Generally speaking hamburgers start off simple and then get very, very complicated.

A plain old hamburger for example will contain beef, bread, pickle, ketchup, mustard, onion and salt and pepper. Easy. Although that bun alone contains some twenty to thirty ingredients including hydrogenated oils (the stuff that keeps food alive for 100 years and humans alive for about 57), the ketchup has plenty of high fructose corn syrup in it and the pickle is packed with preservatives and some 'natural flavour' which is not quite natural enough for the pickle to already contain it naturally.

But if you want to get really complicated, then track down the chicken recipes of many fast food restaurants around the world. What you will find is that chicken is just one of the delicious meats being served to you as 'chicken'. Actually that 'chicken' also includes beef, and probably pork, in the form of cheap injected protein powders. Because when you think fast food chicken what you really ought to be doing is picturing a pink inflatable flapping water balloon. Astonishingly, some 40 per cent of a fast food chicken is water and the protein powders are needed to keep the water in the bird. Cheap food really takes some thinking about.

Plus of course all of those extra flavours you love - the barbecue sauces and oriental dips, the spicey hots and sweet and sours, well of course they're designed by scientists miles away from a kitchen with little petri dishes of ingredients like cellulose gum, xanthan gum, caramel colour, natural hickory smoke flavour and more high fructose corn syrup. But you knew all that already, didn't you?

French Fries

In the past when fast food restaurants didn't understand the concept of the non-meat eater the one vegetarian option animal lovers could rely on when eating out was the humble potato. Except it wasn't. Because the harmless french fry actually contained more meat than a hamburger due to the huge amount of animal fat it was fried in. This later changed but the fry still does contain some animal, due to more of that mysterious 'natural flavouring' which comes from beef. How natural is that?

Also if you like oil, especially that oil that preserves you along with the food, then most fries are cooked in a list of various hydrogenated oils. Delicious.

Milkshakes

Milkshakes are easy. And healthy. If you make them yourself. But there is nothing simple about the milkshake you will drink in a fast food joint. Most of them contain over 50 ingredients, with no mention of any fruit. The one thing a strawberry flavoured milkshake will not contain for example is strawberries. But it will be packed with other goodies like high-fructose corn syrup, guar gum, monoglycerides and diglycerides, cellulose gum, sodium phosphate, carrageenan, citric acid, E129... And as for the strawberries, well all you need are about 40 chemicals including lemon essential oil, orris butter, mint essential oil, rose, benzyl acetate and hydroxyphrenyl-2-butanone (10% solution in alcohol). Get cooking!

Soft drinks

Soft drinks are one of the big money spinners of fast food restaurants. Incredibly cheap to produce they can be sold with a nice fat profit margin. But why are they so cheap, and how do they differ from the soft drink you might buy in a can in a supermarket? Well for a start the black bubbly stuff you will buy in a fast food restaurant comes from a Coca-Cola syrup, which the store buys in enormous quantities. This is then diluted with gassy water and sold in a cheap paper cup. Think of a glass of orange squash. The orange concentrate is the cost and all that clear tap water that fills seven eighths of the glass is pure fast food profit. The bigger the cup the bigger the profit. Hence the beauty of the supersize.

Salad

Of course the way to avoid all this trouble is to walk right up to the counter and order a nice big green salad. But the shocking truth is that many of the salads fast food restaurants serve often have more fat in them than the burgers!!! How much evil can there be in the world?

In fact if you do want a salad you really need to do your homework and check out the exact nutritional breakdown. For example a Wendy's Garden Sensations Mandarin Chicken Salad has more calories, fat, carbs, and sugar than one of their whopping Double Stack burgers. Why Why Why?!

Well a lot of it has to do with the dressings. Then many of the healthy salad options fast food restaurants supply actually come packed with unhealthy meat. And then there's all the cheese. Wouldn't it be nice if you could order a salad and a guy gave you a lettuce, a tomato and a fork.

Ice cream

If you don't know the truth about ice cream then I suggest you don't read on. Because I imagine in your mind when you think of ice cream you think of hot sunny days at the beach with small children and little dogs. Not tons and tons of vegetable oil. But that's exactly what most ice cream is. Just vast vats of oil poured into small cones and fed to babies.

Something else you should also be aware of is the difference between 'fruit' and 'fruit flavoured' ice cream. The guidelines stipulate that a product sold as fruit eg Pineapple Ice Cream must contain at least a gentle scraping of pineapple. But to be named Pineapple Flavoured Ice Cream means the dessert can have as much in common with a pineapple as a pogo stick.

If you've just read this and feel sick, the good news is that anything labelled as dairy ice cream is not allowed to contain vegetable fat. Hurrah.

Coffee

Now surely fast food coffee is OK. Well that depends how you like it. Hot or cold? Because the iced version can come with bowel-cleaning agents (sodium phosphate), sodium stearoyl lactylate which can irritate the eyes and skin and tetra sodium pyrophosphate which when ingested can cause nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.

And don't mention the hygiene

There are a lot of things the fast food restaurants won't tell you. And one of them is just how clean their restaurants are. A survey conducted by Dateline NBC a few years back in America found 60 per cent of the nation's top ten fast food restaurants had critical violations of cleanliness, ranging from dead rodents, undercooked meat, chewing gum in a taco and blood dripping from a cup at Hardee's. I think we will leave it there.