Parties at Quick Service Restaurants in Greece

In the last three decades, fast food has completely infiltrated our lives. It is an industry that began from some hot dogs and hamburger stands in Southern California and expanded to each corner of the United States, selling great quantities of food. Nowadays, fast food is served in restaurants, airports, trains, airplanes, zoos, cinemas, high schools, universities and even in cafeterias of hospitals. In 1970, the Americans spent around 6 billion dollars on fast food. In the year 2000, they spent over 110 billion dollars. Today, they spend more on fast food than they allocate for education, personal computers, computers software or new cars. They also spend more on than they do globally on films, books, magazines, newspapers, video and music.

You open the glass doors, you feel the cool air, you walk in, you stand in line, you observe the colored pictures with the meals, you give your order, you pay a certain amount of money, you see young boys and girls in uniforms, pressing various buttons in order to execute their orders and after a few moments, you take a plastic tray full of food, wrapped in colorful paper. The whole experience of the market has become so routine, pedestrian and common, that we consider it to be as something standard like the daily brushing of our teeth. It has become a social custom equally to the small, square, American frozen and heated apple pie.

Fast food has proven to be a revolutionary force in the American life. It interests us not only as a product but also how it affects our society. The eating habits of the people (what they eat or what they do not eat) are always determined by a complicated social cluster of economic and technological forces. The diet of a country can reveal many things about its art and literature. Every day, in the United States, about one quarter of the adult population visits a fast food store. In short time, the fast food industry has contributed to the transformation not only of the American diet,...