Essay on Food Art

The article I consulted is called: “ The restaurant and fast food race: who is wining”. It is an article written by Douglas. Brown, a professor at Georgetown university. This article intrigued me because it discusses the social behavior of choosing between fast food and food at the restaurant and provided me recent research studies of the trends in restaurants and fest food sectors in order to analyze the social issues related to those choices. My essay is inspired by the slow and quick food discussion we watched in this week’s lecture.

In this article, the social demographics of fast food choices and restaurants are compared and the conclusion that fast food still observes an increasing demands from people despite the lower income stereotype within the fast food industry. Fast food industry has created more employment and its growing industry size offers many people a stable hourly income. The prices of fast food, considering the consumer index rise, has raised more as compared to restaurant foods. Although people have been told that fast food is not real food, and the stigma of fast food and the occurrences of obesity has been revealed, many people still choose to consume fast food instead of restaurant food considering that fast food is quick and could better comply with the needs of people nowadays. Moreover, many people chose fast food because they are left with no choices due to commute times and inconvenient working places. The article also compared the revenue results of fast food and restaurant food and reached to the conclusion that fast food industry has a more rapid industrial growth due to the consistent supply chain and the demands and although restaurants also have an observable growth in terms of market size, they observe a smaller revenue margin in general. So the general conclusion is that the fast food industry is winning over the restaurants.

In my source, the author holds a relatively neutral attitude towards the growth of fast food industry and has a very scholarly attitude in the inquiry of the economics behind fast food industry and restaurant industry. However, I find that this article is lack of analysis and observations from the social perspective of things apart from the few mentioning of previous conclusions about the relationship between fast food and socio-economic statuses. I think that it is important to realize that the choice of fast food and restaurant also represents the society’s understanding of food and people’s perception of the importance of embracing art in life. In Tefler’s article about food as art, she focuses a lot on presenting food as art from a variety of angles including the nutritional values of food and demonstrated the view that art proves that forms are not necessary for beauty. According to my observations, Tefler’s article took a more philosophical approach in analyzing food as art and clearly, as compared to the scientific based, economic driven analysis in the paper of my choice, Tefler’s article is more artistic and poetically constructed. However, I think both articles have very important values in the thinking about art and food and life.

For example, when thinking about food as art, I realized that it is not enough to just consider the techniques of cooking and the fancy meal preparation processes in higher end restaurants. Food is art because food doesn’t require a form to become enjoyable and crucial for human existence. If we think of food as art only for food’s aesthetic attributions, we are not understanding food as art. Fast food could also be art if people start to truly recognize the importance of art in life and start to think about how fast lifestyles could also be artistic. When talking about the artistic life styles under a fast pace, I am thinking about renovating the fast food industry from different perspectives. For example, increasing the nutritional values of fast foods, and making fast food healthy and useful for human body. The stigmatization of fast food and the promotion of slow food won’t do people a lot of goods because the reality is that people nowadays live in a very fast-paced society.

I think that when considering who is the winner in the food industry, we should not judge food from ‘how vintage is the cooking style’ and we should be more inclusive to the renovations in the food industry. The society needs to has an up-to-date food industry and fast food industry is something we cannot avoid. How to embrace art within food should be the new question to ask.

Reference:

Brown, D. (n.d.). The Restaurant and Fast Food Race: Who’s Winning? Southern Economic Journal, 984-984.