Over time, the consumption of potatoes in it's various forms has decreased. Potato chips, while having a much lower pound per year consumption than other forms, has held steady with little changes while fresh vegetables and potatoes has decreased since about 2003. There has been a slight increase in potato chip consumption in the recent years, but not much. Unsurprisingly, canned and dehydrated potatoes are low and have stayed that way.
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Upon pulling into the Taco Bell parking lot, I had already devised a plan to break the norms of McDonaldization. I was to walk in, order whatever I wanted for dinner, and then pay for the meal with my ten dollar bill only to then ask for my change in quarters. Since it was Saturday evening after the horrendous Michigan game, there was quite a few customers waiting at both the drive thru and inside. I went inside to get in line, people eventually walking in and waiting behind me. After a few minutes, I was finally up to order. I wasn’t particularly hungry so I just ordered a seasoned beef quesarito, which totaled to $2.64. After handing over my ten, I asked if I could get the change back in quarters as I was planning on meeting up with friends at the arcade in Zap Zone. At first my request was met with confusion, she asked me if I really wanted all of it back in quarters, or maybe just part of it; I clarified I wanted all quarters. She hesitantly opened the register and started counting out quarters, but there wasn’t quite enough to meet the 29 that I needed. She asked if the rest could be in normal bills and change, but I insisted it had to be in quarters for my plans. She then pulled out a roll of quarters, broke it open, and added a few more to the pile. While this was happening, I could hear the sighs and mumbles of customers behind me who were impatiently waiting to eat. I was eventually handed my 29 quarters plus eleven cents, and was given my receipt. I thanked the cashier, waited for my meal, and then left without any other incidents.
The rules of McDonaldization are efficiency, predictability, calculability, and control. According to George Ritzer’s The McDonaldization of Society, “[e]fficiency means choosing the optimum means to a given end (54).” By asking for 29 quarters, a dime, and a penny instead of a five, two ones, a quarter, a dime, and a penny, I broke the rules of optimization that comes with the efficiency aspect of McDonaldization. To use a bit of calculability myself, I took about four minutes at the register for my $2.64 order while other customers generally take about two minutes for potentially larger and thus more expensive orders. Therefore, I took a much greater amount of time for likely a smaller profit. As we’ve learned from readings such as The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food and the podcast “Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (And Winning),” big food companies will do just about anything for easy profits; this should easily include fast food restaurants. Molding the system to accommodate arbitrary services like only giving back quarters is something companies want to minimize in order to gain the largest profits possible with the littlest work. As an engineering major, I think efficiency is extremely important to modern society and advances in technology, so this optimization seems like a productive way of doing things moving forward. Figure 1: A picture of the main compartment of the refrigerator. Figure 2: A picture the main compartment of the freezer. Figure 3: A picture of the sub-compartment of the refrigerator. Wanda and I asked a friend of ours to get his mother to take pictures of her refrigerator at home. The refrigerator is split up into several compartments, pictured above, instead of having two main compartments; being the fridge and freezer.
At first glance, the thing that sticks out the most for me is the large drawer of primarily pop as shown in Figure 3. There isn't a particularly large number of any single type; the most being five bottles of diet coke. I'm not sure if this means they buy packs of the sodas and are able to drink through them fairly quickly or if perhaps they buy the sodas individually, maybe at gas stations, and store them for later use. Either way, it's no surprise that an average household would have lots of pop considering companies gruel and grime over the perfect bliss point and marketing scheme to get consumers to buy more and more as Michael Moss explains in The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food. Taking a look at the two main compartments - shown in Figures 1 and 2 - it can be deduced that frozen and processed foods are a typical trend. There is no fresh produce in the refrigerator, but in its wake are plenty of snack foods and condiments. The freezer tells a similar tale, holding several boxes and bags of frozen food to be microwaved for later. Something from the Oven talks about how companies advertised their products as something so quick that being late to work is no longer an excuse to skip breakfast. The convenience of the items present here tells me that this is the refrigerator of a working class family who's limited time means something quick and readily available is a must. Wanda mentioned in her blog post that she thinks that the refrigerated bread means they don't eat it often, however I disagree and think that they're trying to be more efficient by putting the bread in the fridge to lengthen its time before molding in a cabinet; the foods that can last long periods of time without spoiling are prevalent so as not to waste money. Overall, besides the fact that there is no produce whatsoever, I find this to be a fairly average refrigerator - at least what I define as an "average" fridge. Processed food is a common household item nowadays, and finding freezers and fridges filled it the brim with them is not out of the ordinary. Day 1: Typical Day (Friday, September 16) Waking up at 8 a.m., I made my way down to the Shaw cafeteria to find a quick breakfast before heading to my first class of the day. I picked up something quick:
Day 2: Avoid Processed Foods (Saturday, September 17) On Saturday I tried my best to avoid processed foods, and found it extremely hard given the meals offered at the cafeteria. Meals aren't typically catered to having fresh ingredients, instead focusing on having quick and efficient meals to serve to thousands of students every day. Since I wasn't in a rush to get to class in the morning, I leisurely made my way through the omelet line and had:
For lunch, the cafeteria was serving burgers, fries, and pizza. Knowing that all of this must be highly processed and containing tons of preservatives, I instead headed for the salad bar. There I had:
A Quick Reflection Trying to avoid processed foods was extremely difficult and I felt like I didn't do a great job at it. It seems to me that my vision of what processed foods are is skewed. I thought that foods that seem "whole" such as chicken and fruits couldn't have been as processed as foods such as burgers and cereal, but I now think that that's not entirely true. Just as I had thought Subway was the peak of fresh ingredients and non-processed foods, Melanie Warner in Pandora's Lunchbox proved all this to be wrong. All these foods I had perceived to be natural have some kind of additives to give them the long "shelf life" that's needed to be able to serve to college students such as myself. I would like to say that one day I might be able to completely isolate myself from foods with these sorts of chemicals added to them, but I can't see it happening with how dominant they are in the food market.
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