I’m genuinely curious. Years ago, I was a chubby young pothead who lived on fast food. Taco Bell, McDonald’s, KFC, you name it—I ate it. Back in college, fast food probably made up at least 50% of my diet. And it wasn’t just because it was quick and cheap—I actually enjoyed it.
But these days, I find myself craving it less and less. Besides being more health-conscious, it just doesn’t hit the spot like it used to. It’s more expensive than ever, mostly bland, and I feel terrible after I eat it. So what’s changed? Is it just part of the enshitification of everything? Have I just gotten old, or has fast food really gone downhill?
Fast food is called “fast food” because it’s fast, not because it’s food.
Apart from that, there is probably no production chain that has profited better from making things the cheaper way than anything related to food.
So this does not just concern fast food, but the HFCS loaded soda you drink, your bread swimming in dough raising and stabilizing chemicals, or your tinned soup made from water, starch, food coloring, flavors, and preservatives.
Just because of the masses produced and sold, any cent saved on a single Burger quickly adds up to a million dollar in extra profits. Don’t expect them to waste that money on better ingredients or flavor, as long as you keep buying that stuff, they keep on making it worse to save yet another cent.
Yeh you don’t like it, sure, but the question was whether it had gotten worse in some way that’s quantifiably different to how it used to be in the past, or if it’s just OP’s personal taste changing.
I stopped eating fast food during covid and never got back into it.
The one time, post covid, I was out and stopped to eat, it was gross. But it’d been so long, I genuinely don’t know if it had always been gross and I lost my acclimation to it, or if it was actually more gross than it used to be.
Anecdotally, I’ve heard complaints online that the quality has gone down while the prices went up, so it probably has gotten worse.
Deny these parasites profit!
The only fast food I enjoyed in recent memory was Pizza Hut. During some scare about MSG they removed all of the MSG and I ordered it a time or two after that and it was nearly inedible.
I suspect similar things happened with other types of fast food. I think there’s a flanderization effect happening with a lot of it. The same is definitively not the case for things like pizza in general, as I can order from my local NY-style pizza place and pizza is still just as good as it ever was.
All that is to say it wouldn’t surprise me at all if fast food was objectively shittier across a number of different metrics.
Like everything else they are dropping quality and portion sizes while increasing prices. Line must go up. Last time I bought a quarter pounder at mcdonalds it was definitely made from 70% mongolian horse lung. Yea, I remember when it used to be a tasty burger. Fucking weird that their “beef” has become gamey.
