Fast food

This chapter examines fast food as a cultural, economic, and symbolic object rather than a mere culinary phenomenon. While McDonald’s is often cited as the archetype of rationalized consumption, the chapter reveals the limits and contradictions of this model. It situates fast food within a broader dialectic opposing “junk food” and gastronomy, showing how this opposition obscures the fact that digital management systems and data-driven optimization now permeate both fast food and haute cuisine alike, rendering the cultural conflict between them largely artificial. In this sense, fast food emerges less as an anomaly than as a mirror reflecting modern society’s deeper contradictions around labor, taste, efficiency, and technological governance.