By Rishi Morrall Words: 989
I uncover the secrets of fast food...
EGGS
Many Fast food restaurants are asked about there eggs and a lot of the time they lie. But after searching the web, we found that most fast-food restaurants source caged eggs. When the global fast-food company, Mcdonalds was faced with that question Mcdonalds, Australia wrote "Our eggs are not organic, nor are they free-range; they are from caged hens,"
Apparently caged hens are cheaper than free-range eggs.
"Our goal is to provide customers with great quality food at a great value," the company's answer reads. "The cost of organic or free-range eggs would raise the price of our food to a point that our customers may not feel they are receiving the value they've come to expect from us."
Except if I were walking into a shop and there was a choice of free-range, organic and caged, caged would be out of the question and I am sure it would be for many others when buying eggs. If I were to go to a Mcdonalds and I had a choice to pick a £2.69 sausage and egg McMuffin with caged eggs or a £3 one with free-range eggs I would pick free-range eggs.
So would ciwf.org who have an interesting campaign about caged eggs. They want it to be banned, which I and many others do but it is not easy to ban things these days because if something is banned it will make some people want it even more. For instance, if they banned cigarettes, some people would still smoke, because they think it would make them look cool if they did something that was banned.
They have some very interesting points in that campaign such as "Across the world, billions of animals are farmed in cages. That includes pigs, hens, rabbits, ducks and quail – all subjected to cage cruelty. Sows are forced to nurse their piglets in crates, rabbits and quail endure their whole lives in barren cages, and ducks and geese are caged for force-feeding to produce foie gras. These systems confine, restrict, and prevent animals from expressing their natural behaviours." That is just their first paragraph, check out more at https://www.ciwf.org.uk/our-campaigns/end-the-cage-age/#start
Another question pointed at caged eggs, free-range and organic eggs is: Are you more likely to get food poisoning from caged eggs than any other (At the time of dreaming up this article, food poisoning was meant to be the main focus of this blog). This one has been very hard to investigate because lots of websites don't give a straight forward answer. cspinet.org does have a good answer though "Does cage-free reduce the risk of food poisoning from eggs? Are they more likely to be free of Salmonella and other contaminants? It’s not clear. “The evidence suggests that cage-free facilities have significantly lower risks of Salmonella infection,” says The Humane Society’s Paul Shapiro." But sadly Paul Shapiro's statement comes from Europe in 2004-2005. This is bad because most fast-food restaurants are located in America and obviously we live in 2020 at the time of writing this.
Resources for egg
ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECT
This is yet another commonly asked question on the topic of fast-food. As you probably already know fast-food has a horrible effect on the environment. As they use so many plastics. And as you probably know plastics are horrible for the environment and can sometimes, in fact usually will get stuck in the oceans of our beautiful planet. Why is this so bad you ask? This is bad because some amazing marine animals will breathe in or swallow the plastics as they mistake the plastics for food. Which could cause fatal damage unless treated urgently. plasticoceans.uk says "More than 8 million tonnes of plastic enter the ocean each year. This causes great harm to marine ecosystems. We depend on the ocean for our survival.
80% of plastic that reaches our ocean comes from you and me – from what citizens throw away. We are developing tools, resources and activities that will inspire people to live more sustainably with plastic." and savetheenvironmentfreinds.org says "There are lots of people who fear something. The ‘people’ are rich businessmen who own vast and non-eco-friendly companies. The ‘something’ is climate change or global warming. But the businessmen that have the power to help aren’t scared of the disastrous effects that will play out if they do not act. They are scared that if they act, they will cease to make enormous amounts of money. Money put above our generation’s future, their children’s and grandchildren’s futures." and we all know that some of those businessmen could be some fast-food restaurant owners.
Fast-food restaurants use a lot of plastic straws, which as I said is plastic so therefore not good for the environment, however, lots of fast food places have transformed to paper straw mass producers, but are these new ways of drinking really good for the environment? After a bit of research, we found a lot of news stories about Mcdonalds and its paper straws, here's the insider: McDonald's sent plastic straws to the dump at all its UK restaurants in the September of 2018, replacing them with paper versions following pressure to produce a greener, more eco-friendly business model.
bbc.co.uk says "Last year, it axed plastic straws, even though they were recyclable, in all its UK branches as part of a green drive.
But the US fast-food giant says the new paper straws are not yet easy to recycle and should be put into general waste."
Apparently, the fast-food giant says that the straws are too thick to be recycled and recycling centres won't take them.
However, a controversial claim from the straws makers says that the straws are recyclable. Ebbw Value-based Transcend Packaging said there wasn't a problem with the straws, just the UK needed to up its recycling facilities.
ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECT RESOURCES
©copywrite Rishi's Kitchen 2020
I really enjoyed reading your fast food article. Unfortunately, we have a McDonalds near us. I think they should have to pay an environmental tax on their packaging. It could go towards cleaning up the rubbish that ‘scum bags’ dump when they have finished eating their caged eggs and cows’ faces! 😵
Hope you the first blog in a series that I have been willing to publish for ages!