If you want to go for a cheap and convenient meal these days, the first thing that would spring to mind for many people would undoubtedly be a fast food takeaway. “There’s nothing in the fridge; let’s just get a McDonald's” or “I can’t be bothered to cook tonight; shall we just get a KFC?” are phrases that might commonly be heard on an evening after a long day at work. As far as I am aware, this was initially the main purpose of fast food restaurants. An option as a quick, cheap, and tasty meal when time is not on your side.

Yet with even the faintest of glances at society nowadays, we can clearly see that fast food restaurants and takeaways have gone above and beyond these initial ambitions to now establish massive control and influence over the food industry. According to Statista data, the number of fast-food restaurants and takeaways in the UK has increased from just over 37,000 in 2013 to a projected 49,539 in 2024.

So what can we draw from this increased popularity of fast food takeaways? Firstly, it means either people are choosing to cook and eat at home less or they are choosing a different option for eating out. Actually, I would be inclined to think that both of these circumstances are currently happening in the UK. Expanding on that, we can say that this increased popularity has significant implications for the population’s health and finances.

Focusing on the situation regarding people’s preferences over which type of restaurant to choose, it is clear that, in the UK at least, fast food takeaways have usurped full-service restaurants as the popular choice when paying for a meal. According to ibisworld, the number of full-service restaurants in the UK fell by around 4.5% per year from 2018 to 2023. These figures are, of course, likely to be affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. That being said, other sectors, such as airports and their passenger numbers, are now seeing higher numbers of customers than the pre-covid levels. Therefore, we can justifiably expect customers to return to full service restaurants in a similar way. But this data, along with my own observations, would suggest that, regardless of COVID, people are now opting for a takeaway over a sit down meal.

This is not a trend that is confined to the UK either, I could use my time living in a small city in central Portugal as a microcosm representing this. The Portuguese are famed for their high-quality cuisine, and you will find many independently run restaurants littered around any city that you visit there. What’s more, the small restaurants are often very reasonably priced. Taking my city of Viseu as an example, you can easily get a healthy portion of good quality, freshly prepared food with a drink for around 10–15 euros. Despite this, I would frequently walk past one of the two McDonalds in the city, which was nearby my house, on a Sunday evening and witness the imposing queue of cars for the drive-through snaking out onto the main road and stretching further back for many meters, to the point where it would use up the outer lane of a major roundabout. Yet at the same time, my favorite local family-run restaurant had to close early on a Sunday due to a lack of demand.

This is only a small sample size, but the cost of a two course meal in this restaurant was roughly the same as a Big Mac meal at McDonald’s. So the argument that fast food takeaways are a cheaper option is not always true. On top of that, when you spend over half an hour queuing in a drive through before you even order, you can hardly argue that the food arrives much quicker than in a full service restaurant.

Why is it then that people are flocking to the golden arches over these independent restaurants that were once the lifeblood of many towns and cities? If anybody had the audacity to suggest that fast food takeaways taste better than restaurants such as my favourite traditional Portuguese restaurant, it would be clear that they are either intoxicated or they simply haven’t ever known what good food is. The notion of enjoying a factory-made meal over one that has been freshly prepared and cooked by experienced hands is madness, in my view. However, it is certainly not up to me to tell people what they should or should not enjoy eating more of.

I think it would be fair to say that this trend towards takeaways is a reflection of where society is at the moment with regards to short-term satisfaction. It could all originate from an upbringing of eating ultra-processed foods, whose chemicals and additives provide us with an immediate dopamine rush, only to soon wear off and leave us in a sort of calorie coma. Or maybe it's the capitalist world that we all grow up in, which insists on immediate convenience and gratification, with no view of the wider and longer term impacts of our choices.

In an age of fast fashion, we rarely consider who is being exploited in order to provide us with cheap, dispensable, and convenient clothing. Rightly so, this mercantile activity is condemned in terms of the ethical implications it brings. Whilst fast food is similarly condemned, it is more so in terms of what it does to our health than the ethical implications of this consumer choice. It strikes me that you seldom hear complaints or quarrels over the moral decision of having a fast food takeaway from a large corporation. I can count on one hand the number of friends I have who would rather go to an independent coffee shop than ‘grab a quick Starbucks’. When I compare fast food with something like fast fashion, I see little difference in the negative impacts that they have on the market in which they operate.

The recent boom in fast food and takeaways is not only detrimental to our health, it drains the blood of the many independent restaurants and cafes that simply cannot compete with the far reaching influence of big chain corporations. The next time you decide against cooking at home and choose to have a meal cooked for you, which option will you decide to go for? Will you spend an extra bit of time looking for a reasonably priced independent restaurant that likely uses fresh, home-made ingredients, or will you allow your mental programming to steer you towards the most prominent brand of takeaway and succumb to that internal voice that says, ‘I just want a Big Mac’?