It’s become a well-known fact that billionaire Warren Buffett starts off each morning at the McDonald’s drive-through. His choice of breakfast? Bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit if stocks are up and two sausage patties if they are down. Buffett isn’t alone, roughly 36% of Americans eat fast food every day, according to the CDC. With the recent surge of interest in plant-based meat products from long-established fast-food chains, we have to ask whether or not fast food could save the planet?
Why Does My Fast-Food Diet Concern You? Up until about 2018, academic literature and news headlines were dominated by the impact of fast food on health and obesity highlighted by popular movies such as Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me, but the tide has steadily begun to shift. Now, more than ever, we are preoccupied with our environmental impact while struggling to combat a lifetime of addiction to highly saturated fatty, salty, and sugary foods. In addition to fighting against the overwhelming pleasure signals in our brains from these foods (which “adapts and makes more receptors for dopamine,” creating an addiction like dependency — we need more and more of the same substance to receive the same pleasure originally derived), we are facing an industry deeply entrenched in politics, subsidies, monopolies, and lobbyists which have no real motivation to change their course swiftly.
Roughly 50 billion burgers are consumed each year in the United States, or 2.4 burgers per day per person, according to the USDA. (At the time of publication, the exact data for beef dedicated to the fast-food industry could not be found however, national McDonald’s burger estimates are around 2.36 billion burgers annually) Followed by China, the EU, Brazil, and India, the United States still remains the largest consumer of beef products. Breaking it down, American beef has a greater greenhouse gas emissions impact than the entire country of the Netherlands.
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