Fast food nation

Yesterday in class, Ann treated us to a good ‘ol American meal, Diet Coke and Ramen noodles. In my last blog, I talked about commodified taste and you can’t get more commodified that Diet Coke and Ramen noodles. While we were enjoying this fabulous meal, Ann had us write down what was on our mind while we ate. For the Ramen, I wrote things like “doesn’t smell like it tastes,” “chickenized,” “salty,” and “gives me a headache after a while.” Now that’s probably not the best list of things to describe a product, but Diet Coke didn’t score much better. For that I had things like “watery,” “not a good aftertaste,” syrupy,” and “doesn’t go down very well.”

Like the Taco Bell that I mentioned in my last blog, Diet Coke and Ramen noodles are another of America’s commodified tastes. Alison Leitch talks about the Slow Food Movement in her article as a way to try to move away from these commodified, fast foods. I pulled up the Wikipedia on the Slow Food Movement and here is what it says, “The Slow Food Movement was founded by Carlo Petrini in Italy as a resistance movement to combat fast food. It claims to preserve the cultural cuisine and the associated food plants and seeds, domestic animals, and farming within an ecoregion.” This is pretty much the exact opposite of Diet Coke and Ramen. The exercise today was not only a fun way to illustrate the Leitch article but it actually is a little bit of an eye-opener as to not only how commodified our taste has become (taste about more in the previous post) but that we really have become a “fast food” nation.