The Influence of the Fast Food Industries in Promoting Obesity

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If it was actually the end goal of corporate food chains, fast food industries have done an inconceivably effective job at increasing the amount of cases in morbid obesity and food-related health problems. The explosion of the fast food industries in the last two-hundred years has had obesity kits rolling out of the drive thru on conveyer belts, while also being able to massively decrease life expectancies everywhere. However, the most terrifying harm that the fast food industry has unintentionally manufactured is the quantifiably worse impact that it has had on the environment.
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In order for these industries to be able to provide massive amounts of “food”, these companies have to do significant harm to plant life, animal life, the global landscape, and do nothing genuinely effective to change it. Even according to four different views on environmental ethics, the fast food industries are damaging beyond our conceptualization of the operation behind it.
The Anthropocentric view of environmental ethics is the one that follows the premise that only human beings have intrinsic value, or that only human beings have value as an end-in-itself and simply for being born human.

It follows from this premise that everything else has extrinsic value, or instrumental value, that assigns value to things based on its resource potential and the benefits that human beings can take. Anthropocentric ethics takes it a step further and claims that human beings are the only moral agents, which suggests that only humans are capable of discerning and acting in a purpose that is right or wrong.

This inevitably means that human beings are the only ones that have a responsibility to act according to the standard of morality as best as we can, or we are the only ones with moral obligations. Although it could be argued that the fast food industries aid in the thriving of human beings, the harsh truth of the issue is that these companies do tremendous long term damage to the sustainability of the human race. When we recognize that the survival of human beings is dependent upon the extrinsic value of the land, animals, plants, and the rest of the environment, we will find ourselves at a conflict when we find that the fast food industries are doing significant harm to the entities that provide resources for us to survive.
In this way, the Anthropocentric view disagrees with the actions of the fast food industry because it hurts ourselves in the process. The fast food industries are key contributing factors to the desolation of the local and global environmental communities. Aside from the fact that the fast food industries directly tamper with all edible plant life and structurally interferes with the natural process that governs animal life, the most crucial effect that fast food has on the environment is the pollution that follows the operations that are required to make these companies succeed. Even if we make the most generous assumptions that all companies like McDonalds could absolutely eliminate all garbage waste from polluting the local ecosystems and killing the natural life cycles of it, the corporate operations that followed the industrial revolution has created this mechanism that basically requires millions of grams of greenhouse gas emissions just to provide the “meat” that is sold at an overwhelming majority of fast food restaurants.
To put this into perspective, a 2007 study determined that “the greenhouse gas emissions arising every year from the production and consumption of cheeseburgers is roughly the amount emitted by 6.5 million to 19.6 million SUVs.” (Cascio). When dealing exclusively with carbon emissions, we can examine the exact process in how we are slowly suffocating ourselves, and every other animal and their dependents. Through the process of carbon emissions diffusing into the ocean to create more and more carbonic acid, the algae and other plant life that contributes to the vast majority of the all the oxygen in the atmosphere is dying. In the act of failing to think about the thriving of other environmental entities, the effect of not thinking about the world around us is the cause of that which will kill us.
The view that takes the teleological route in assigning intrinsic value to both human and animal life is that of the Bio-centric ethics. Not only does the Bio-centric view accept the premise that both humans and animals have intrinsic value, but it equates the two as equal members of the biotic community that should only interact as organisms living together in a habitat. In an environmental system of interdependence between humans and animals, there is no dominance of one species over another in a mutual and equal dependence on one another.
According to the Bio-centric view, the organizational captivation of animals for what they can provide very accurately equates to the cruelty and genocide in Nazi Germany. Though there are less obvious and direct issues against the fast food industries, such as the air pollution that corporate operations cause, there are very clear reservations against the absolute dominance that animal farming has over other biological beings. The fast food industry recognizes animals as property and products that are purely extrinsic and is the direct opposite of the Bio-centric view in every way. When we apply the concept of ethical holism, we should view the world as a whole with intrinsic value. The result of assigning intrinsic value to humans, animals, plant life, and the land is the view of Eco-centric ethics.
Likely the defining key difference between Eco-centric ethics and Bio-centric ethics is the significant change of perception in the assignment of intrinsic value. As soon as we accept the premises of plants and land having intrinsic value, the perception becomes a view of the world as a collective environmental community that is conscious of the natural order. When we accept these premises, we stray away from the views that legitimize the domination of plant life and the land to humans and animals. Once we accept the premises of the Eco-centric ethics, there are firmer reservations against the fast food industries production of GMOs and the structural intervention in the land by the hand of crop farming.
Despite what scientists think, GMOs has a larger effect than the individual plants that are genetically altered. Just about every nation on the planet, with the exception of Australia, recognizes that GMO crops have an adverse effect on neighboring crops through natural pollination processes. The problem then becomes more concerned about the effect that the fast food industry has on plant life on a massive scale instead of on an individual one, which is still a very extreme concern according to the Eco-centric view. Deep Ecology could be considered an absolute rework of society in order to become more linear with environmental ethics.
This position is less of a view on environmental ethics and how things ought to be and more of an advocacy for actual change completely based on the idea of being consistent with the rhetoric of environmental ethics. According to the advocacy of Deep Ecology, the fast food industry wouldn’t even be a question of what should be done about it because it shouldn’t even exist in a world where environmental ethics are valued first. Although many fast food industries seem to make public efforts to make their operations more eco-friendly, the fast food industries do not think of the environment first. Because fast food industries are always driven by profit first, the fast food industry will never be approved in environmental ethics.
Work Cited

Cascio, Jamais. (2007). The Cheeseburger Footprint. Forbes Magazine. Forbes.com. 10 March 2015. Web. 15 January 2007

Jennie Griffith

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