The Satyricon

The Satyicon for me was a bit hard to follow as I read through each chapter.  Trimalchio is a freedman who had attained power and wealth.  He is well known for putting on extravagant dinner parties where his servants bring course after course of delicacies.  One portion of the reading described the circular tray that presented the food.  The tray is presented with exotic food that represents each zodiac sign such as a sea fish or bull's eye.  I could never imagine being presented with all this food, I would never know where to start.  Throughout the book, Trimalchio shows off his wealth to his guests.  I believe when you are wealthier, having lavish dinner parties or parties in general was a way for you to show off the wealth you have consumed.  In some cultures, the way you dress shows off your wealth.  Was having dinner parties apart of their culture to show off wealth?  Wine is the drink of choice that is constantly being poured to Trimalchio and the guests.  After a few glasses, Trimalchio gives his guests a tour of his house giving them an act of what his funeral would be like.  Habinnas is a well known- tomb builder that was present at the dinner party as a guest.  I believe from the reading, he was the one who had built the tomb that Trimalchio would lie in when he passed.  In the story, Trimalchio brags about how all the food and wine is from his own property.  This kind of goes hand in hand of what we have been talking about in class about organic foods and farming.  All the food that was presented in the dinner party was fresh and prepared that day. 



Here is a youtube video that vividly describes what these dinners may have looked like!

Personal Essay

I have been reading the book Fast Food Nation and I watched Inside Chipolte.  The book and the documentary go hand in hand within the fast food industry.  With our class discussions and reading everyone's blog posts, I was thinking about incorporating this in my personal essay and discuss about what we are putting in our bodies at certain fast food restaurants (McDonalds and Chipolte).  I was also going to discuss my home life experience compared to my college life experience with food, although this maybe too much like the introduction blog we posted.  I also felt that it was important to touch on whether or not it is more expensive to run through the drive thru or create a home cooked meal.  This could lead into down the road payments with health and hospital bills.  If anyone has any thoughts on how I can improve my outline or what I plan to be discussing in my personal essay please let me know!  I'm sure some of us are feeling a bit lost or need some direction when thinking of what to write about!

Here is an article I had found that compares whether or not it is cheaper to eat out or at home
Which Is Cheaper?

Inside Chipolte

I recently watched the Inside Chipolte documentary.  Chipolte was first established by Steve Ells twenty years ago in 1993 and was opened to generate cash so he could afford to open a whole scale restaurant.  The first Chipolte was opened in Denver, CO and sold tacos and burritos.  The success of Chipolte pushed  his dream of opening his white table cloth restaurant aside and decided to build another Chipolte.  After the first fast food Mexican restaurant was established, sixteen more were quickly developed within five years.  Surprisingly enough they attracted the attention of McDonalds and in1998 they began investing in Chipolte and became the majority stakeholder.  Unfortunately the two fast food restaurants parted ways due to their different cultures.  Once Chipolte went public, 500 locations were developed and today the company is worth about $12 billion.  Chipolte is unlike many of the popular fast food restaurants we know today.  They order fresh whole ingredients, and everything is prepared according to classic cooking techniques, also the food is served in an interactive format so the customers can pick what they want.  The food is quickly made right in front of the eyes of the customers.  This particular fast food restaurant offers customers high quality food that is made fresh.  Chipolte is considered "fast casual" is the fastest growing category in the restaurant business boosting sales 13% in 2012.

 
I found it fascinating that Steve personally visited hog farms to see how the pigs were raised.  To his surprise he found that they were cramped and kept inside and was disgusted with this.  Since this sighing, they no longer used pigs or cows raised on industrial farms.  They now use pork raised on open fields.  Chipolte now uses more naturally raised meat than any other restaurant company in the world and the vegetables is used from locally farms around the country.  I would confidently say that this is considered a healthier choice of the many fast food restaurants that are offered in the United States.  I personally enjoy Chipolte and think that it is excellent food.  It eases my mind to know that all of the ingredients and pork that are used to make my meal is fresh.  I also find it important that Steve Ells took the initiative to educate himself on how and where pork is raised and how he can better improve the ingredients for his customers.  In the video, Steve Ells visits various Chipolte's to interview the employees and managers to see how the restaurant is running and if they enjoy working there.  I thought that this was important that he became involved in the restaurant by visiting them around the country.  From personal experience, I like when the owner of the restaurant is involved and wanting to know what is going on so that they are able to make a good name for their company.  It shows that they are passionate and that they care.  Today, Chipolte has more than 14,000 restaurants in the United States.  Not only is Chipolte selling food made from natural ingredients, they are also selling organic t-shirts and sweatshirts! 

Fast Food Nation part 2

In Fast Food Nation, there is a section that focuses on advertising and children.  Twenty-five years ago, only a handful of American companies directed their marketing at children - Disney, McDonald's, candy makers, toy makers, manufacturers of breakfast cereal.  The explosion in children's advertising occurred during the 1980s.  Many working parents began to feel guilty about spending less time with their children and started to spend more money on them to make up for it.  This decade was considered "the decade of the child consumer."  Market research has found that children often recognize a brand logo before they can recognize their own name.  The very popular camel used to sell cigarettes, showed how easily children can be influenced by the right corporate mascot.  This being said, in 1991, nearly all of America's six-year-old could identify the Joe Camel, who was just as familiar to them as Mickey Mouse.  This familiar mascot was constantly being displayed towards young children and young teens, 1/3 of the cigarettes illegally sold to minors were Camels.  This goes to show how advertising can influence young children.  The bulk of the advertising directed at children today has an immediate goal, giving children a specific reason to ask for the product.  Children are being described as "surrogate salesmen" who persuade their parents into buying what they wanted.  TV advertising aimed at kids is now broadcast twenty-four hours a day and the typical American child now spends about twenty-one hours a week watching television.  During the course of a year, a child watches more than thirty thousand TV commercials.  In my opinion, this is outrageous! I was more appalled when the book stated "Outside of school, the typical American spends more time watching television than doing any other activity except sleeping."  What happened to playing outside?

Fast Food Robbery 


The fast food industry's expansion coincided with a rising incidence of workplace violence in the United States.  Fast food nation explains that a robbery will most likely occur when only a few crew members are present, early in the morning or late near closing time.  Since I am an employee in the fast food industry and park/walk to work, I am always keeping an eye out when I walk to my car or I have someone walk me to my car.  About 2/3 of the robberies at fast food restaurants involve current or former employees.  From my experience working in the food industry, I have found this statement to be true!  I have worked with an employee that had attempted to steal beer from the beer cooler in the basement.  I could not believe that an employee would steal from his own work.  In a 1999 survey constructed by the National Food Service Security Council, a group funded by the large chains, found that about half of all restaurant workers engaged in some form of cash or property theft.  This was not including the theft of food.  The typical employee stole about $218 a year and new employees stole almost $100 more!  Fast food Chain restaurants have tried to reduce violent crime or prevent the crimes from occurring by spending millions on new security measures such as video cameras, panic buttons, burglar alarms, additional lighting, etc.  I found it very interesting that America's fast food restaurants are more attractive to rob than convenience stores, gas stations, or banks.  What makes them so attractive is that fast food restaurants often have thousands of dollars on the premises while gas stations or convenience store chains have worked hard to reduce the amount of money in the till.

   
Everyone has the same question when they eat McDonald's famous french fries; what makes them taste so good?  The taste of fast food fry is largely determined by the cooking oil.  For decades, McDonald's cooked its french fries in a mixture of about 7 percent cottenseed oil and 93 percent beef tallow.  This mixture gave the fries their unique, and ever so popular, flavor- and more saturated beef fat per ounce than a McDonald's hamburger.  Eventually McDonald's moved away from its original mixture and used pure vegetable oil but gave the company an enormous challenge: how to make fries that subtly taste like beef without cooking them in tallow.  A look at the ingredients now used in the preparation of McDonald's french fries suggest how the problem was solved.  At the end of the list is a seemingly innocuous, yet odd phrase: "natural flavor."  This ingredient helps to explain why most of the food American's eat today taste the way it does.  "Natural flavor" is a man-made additive that give most processed food its taste.  I found it interesting that the aroma of a food can be responsible or as much as 90%  of its flavor.  "Flavor" is primarily the smell of gases being released by the chemicals you've just put into your mouth. 


Dangerous Jobs
The author of Fast Food Nation visited one of the nation's largest slaughterhouse entering about five thousand head of cattle everyday.  He found that the injury rate in a slaughterhouse is about three times higher than the rate in a typical American factory.  Many workers will make a knife cute very two or three seconds, which adds up to about 10,000 cuts during an eight-hour shift.  One of the leading determinants of the injury rate at a slaiughterhouse today is the speed of the disassembly line.  The faster it runs, the more likely that workers will get hurt.  Old meatpacking plants in Chicago slaughtered about 50 cattle an hour and today some plants slaughter up to 400 cattle an hour.  The pressure to keep up with the line has encouraged a widespread methamphetamine use among employees.  Meatpackers take "crank" to feel charge and self-confident and supervisors have been known to sell or give away crank to their workers in return for certain favors.  Although "crank" allows one to feel charged with lots of energy, they are actually putting themselves at risk and increases the chance of an accident to occur.

Fast Food Nation

The book that I chose to read is called Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal.  Although I have only read the first fifty some pages, I find that it is a page turner.  At the beginning of the book, I am introduced to Carl N. Karcher, one of the founding fathers of fast food. He grew up on a farm with his family and was given some advice from his father that soon set him up for success.  His father always told him "The harder you work, the luckier you become".  After the end of eighth grade, Carl dropped out of school and soon entered the work force on the farm harvesting, baling hay, and milking and feeding cows.  He had never stepped foot out of Ohio and soon his curiosity landed him in California to work for his uncle.  This is where is all began.  As the book goes on, it describes how California was a growing state and was the second-largest manufacturing center in America.  As the automobile industry boomed so did the type of fast food restaurants.  Fast-food restaurants simply started out as hot dog stands and soon developed into drive in's.  The book describes how Southern California "had recently given birth to an entirely new lifestyle- and a new way of eating. Both revolved around cars". By the time of the 1940's there were more cars in California than there were in forty-one states.  More roadways were created along with drive ins that competed to get traveler's attention.  Carl's success went from a hot dog stand to his very own Drive-in Barbeque that had a five-pointed star symbol we see today as the Hardee's logo. Not only does this book describe the founder of Carl's Jr. restaurant but also the development of McDonald's.

  Link to Carl's Jr. Legacy Project

The McDonald's that we today know and love was first created in 1940 and was first a drive-in business.  The two founders, the McDonald brothers, were tired of constantly looking for new carhops and employees so they closed the restaurant and reopened in 1948.  The "new and improved" McDonald's had a new way of preparing food; it was designed to increase the speed, lower prices, and increase sales.  It did just that.  McDonald's became the first self-service restaurant and in turn, gave the idea to Carl Karcher to open his own self-service restaurant which became Carl's Jr.  As the automobile industry increased, so did the self-service restaurants.  Families could now feed their kids restaurant food at these prices.

I was amazed as I continued to read that these popular restaurants that we know today such as, Taco Bell, McDonald's, Wendy's etc. all were built on the same idea and developed by your everyday average Joe.  These people or soon to be fast-food restaurant owners, would copy and steal ideas from already developed self-service restaurants to create their own!  Carl's success continued to increase until about the 1980's when the Carl's Jr. Restaurant opened in Texas and the value of CKE (Carl Karcher Enterprises Inc.) stock fell.  Carl and his family were accused of insider trading but denied the charges.  Eventually he owed more than $70 million to various banks and eventually was fired by the board members.  Later down the road, Carl regained control of CKE and developed a plan to help save his company and developed the Green Burrito.  The success of this restaurant allowed CKE to  purchase Hardees which is the fourth largest hamburger chain in the US today.  The original logo of Carl's Jr. continued to be the logo for Hardees as well.

I can imagine the change that Carl had seen over a period of time.  He went from gravel to paved roads, hot dog stands to fast food, and saw an increase in the automobile industry.  I am interested to see what else this book and exciting information it has to offer.  So far I am pleased with the book and enjoy reading about the history of fast-food.  I am sure as I continue I won't be so pleased with some information that will be revealed about these fast-food chains that, we as Americans, are drawn to daily.      

Food and Me

Food has always been a part of my life growing up and is the center that brings my family together, not just on the holidays.  Food can express a person, their culture, or the way they are brought up.  Growing up, in a family of 6, my mother would always be the cook, slaving away at the stove.  One of her regular meals that she cooks is Mostaccioli , which is always a family favorite.  My father traveled for work, therefore, when he had his chance to cook it was going to be breakfast for dinner, pizza, or burgers (what kid is really going to say no to that).  Still to this day, my family has certain foods we eat for certain occasions.  For example, during Christmas we all sit down and eat breakfast cinnamon rolls along with an egg sausage casserole.  I really enjoy sitting down with my family during meals to converse and to catch up.  With six people in my family, this is a time where we can all finally breathe and relax.  I never used to enjoy family dinners, but now I can not wait to sit down and enjoy their company.

 

In America, I believe food has always brought people together.  "Bring a dish to pass" is more than likely quoted on party invites, or "what can I bring" is a question most ask when invited to a party.  Over the years I would say my family has healthy eating habits with the occasional McDonald's here and there, but once you are on your own it is a whole different story.  Some college students get their parent's credit cards and others live pay check to pay check to cover their bills and groceries.  Being the college kid that lives pay check to pay check, with some help from my parents, I find myself reaching for the easiest and the fastest thing to eat.  When I don't have time to eat between classes or work I try to have something healthy prepared, otherwise, I pop something in the microwave or eat at work.  Being "on the go" it is hard when trying to make "healthy choices" or eat organically.

I currently work in the food industry at Olde Peninsula Brew Pub downtown Kalamazoo.  I have been working in the food industry since I have been 16 years old.  I find that working in the restaurant business is a great way for one to get experience and I have learned so much from working in the food industry.  I have learned to work together with my co-workers, how to deal with customers (always with a smile), and how to multi-task.  Multi-tasking a job and school has also taught me how to manage my time and stay organized.  I personally think everyone should experience some sort of job in the food industry, you never know what you may learn.  



Not only is being "on the go" a tough way to make healthier decisions, millennials are more to choose a convenient route to eat out, rather than make a meal from scratch at home.   This is an unhealthy habit, as we all know, portion sizes are significantly larger when dining out.  This convenient route has caused  an increase in obesity in our society today.  Although I eat out more than I prepare food, I find that the financial burden of this convenience is heavy.  It is my goal for 2014 to prepare more meals at home and eat out less.  Here is a funny list of New Year's Resolutions everyone should read and consider!