Fast food restaurants like McDonald's employ a mass production process to produce large amounts of standardized food quickly and cheaply. The food is produced in factories, frozen, and shipped to restaurants where it is reheated and cooked using standardized equipment and procedures to ensure consistency. This allows the food to taste nearly identical regardless of location but also means contamination has the potential to affect many people if it occurs during mass production and distribution.

1. Fast Food – How it Works

5. In your book….Write the names of 10 fast foods that you like to eat.Draw pictures of logos showing which restaurant the foods are made at.

6. InterestingFacts About

7. Fast-food has since spread, with more than 30,000 McDonald's restaurants alone located around the world. McDonald's is the undisputed king of fast-food, serving 52 million people a day in more than 100 countries. That's a lot of Chicken McNuggets. In an article in Rolling Stone magazine in 1998, a survey of American schoolchildren revealed that 96 percent of them could identify Ronald McDonald -- only Santa Claus ranked higher at the time. The same article claimed that McDonald's famous "Golden Arches" had become more widely recognized around the world than the Christian cross!Fast foods are... higher in fat and lower in fibre

8. higher in calories and sugar

9. higher in saltCopy into your book!

10. All about McDonalds

11. Dick and Mac McDonaldBy simplifying their menu, the McDonald's brothers were able to speed up orders and bring in hoards of hungry customers.McDonald's, the company that would come to represent what people love or hate about America, has humble roots in the Great Depression. In the 1930s, brothers Dick and Mac McDonald were struggling to make a living running a movie theater in California when they noticed that a nearby hot dog stand always seemed to do a lot of business. With a $5,000 loan, the McDonald brothers started the Airdrome hot dog stand in 1937. By 1940, they moved it from Arcadia to San Bernardino and changed the name to McDonald's Barbeque.Despite success, the brothers wanted to do things better and faster. In a bold move, they temporarily shut down the place in 1948 and reopened with a new, experimental approach. They simplified the menu to focus on burgers, fries and milkshakes In the next six years, business was doing so well that the brothers sold 21 franchises and opened nine outlets. The original restaurant was bustling with so much business that the brothers ordered eight Multimixers -- machines that made five milkshakes at one time!!!Today, as most of us can see, McDonald's restaurants are everywhere. McDonald's typically looks for locations that are the most convenient for people -- in malls, near colleges or in airports.

12. What do they use to cook fast food?

13. The McDonald brothers' help change the design of the restaurant kitchen to suit fast food places. Instead of having lots of different equipment and stations for preparing a wide variety of food that took long times to prepare and cook, the Speedee kitchen was invented, it included:A very large grill where one person could cook lots of burgers simultaneously

14. A dressing station where people added the same condiments to every burger

15. A fryer where one person made french fries

16. A soda fountain and milkshake machine for desserts and beverages

17. A counter where customers placed and received their ordersThese kitchen's purpose, was to make a very large amount of a very few food items e.g. burgers, fries

18. How does fast food work today?No matter which restaurant you visit, the process if much the same... When you visit one of them and go inside, you almost always place your order and collect your food at a counter

19. When you drive through, you place your order at a speaker or a window, and someone hands it to you through a window

20. The food arrives individually wrapped and in a bag or on a tray

21. You can eat most of the food without using a knife or fork

22. The food is relatively inexpensive

23. Individual restaurants in the same chain physically resemble or are identical to one another

24. When you visit different restaurants from the same chain, the menu and food are pretty much the sameCopy into your book!

25. Mass-produced FoodMass production is the production of large amounts of standardized (all the same) products, including and using assembly lines to make them.What does this mean?in general, food from a particular chain tends to taste the same no matter which restaurant you visit. There are several reasons behind this: The food itself is mass produced in a factory and then frozen. Restaurants store this frozen food in large, walk-in freezers. Cooks reheat it rather than making it from scratch.

26. The factory adds artificial and natural flavours to the food to make sure it all tastes the same. These flavours are manufactured separate factories.

27. The equipment in the kitchen cooks all of the food for the same amount of time. For example, in some chains, a conveyor belt carries hamburger patties through a broiler. The broiler cooks the patties on both sides simultaneously, and the conveyor belt makes sure they're cooked for precisely the right amount of time.

28. The employees in different restaurants follow the same instructions for cooking, dressing and packaging the food.How do they get the food....The mass-production process requires each restaurant chain to have a distribution network to carry the food to every restaurant. Warehouses store enormous amounts of everything a restaurant needs, including food, paper products, utensils and cleaning supplies. The warehouses then ship supplies to each restaurant by truck.

29. Health and Safety IssuesThe mass-production process involves sending lots of food through a factory in a short amount of time. For this reason, one sick animal or piece of waste can contaminate a large amount of food very quickly. Bacteria, viruses and parasites can spread to all of the food in a large mixing vat, or it can contaminate machinery used to process the food. This doesn't mean that mass-produced food is less safe than home-cooked food. In fact, most foodborne illnesses come from food cooked in the home. Instead, it means that when contamination does occur, it's likely to affect a lot of people at the same time. For example, in 1993, 700 people became ill after eating hamburgers contaminated with e. coli O157:H7 bacteria. This happened at Jack in the Box, an American fast food joint.