Sometime in the early 70’s I was on a business trip to Amsterdam and was walking along a street with an American colleague when we passed a restaurant with, what to me was, a big yellow ‘M’ sign displayed over the door.“Hey !” cried my American friend … “Where I come from those places are everywhere”.
It was a couple of years later that I saw the first one to open in Britain. It was in Woolwich, South London and I learned that the big ‘yellow M’ was in fact the golden arches of the McDonald’s chain of hamburger restaurants.
Now, more than thirty years later ‘those places are everywhere’ here, along with all the other purveyors of the various varieties of ‘grease with lumps in’.
Having visited the United States a number of times and seen how our American cousins devour their fried chicken by the bucketful and their pizzas by the pile I was shocked this week to learn that Britain has overtaken the USA as the leading nation of fast food gluttons: for in a recent survey some 45% in the UK agreed with the statement “I like the taste of fast food too much to give it up”, while 44% of Americans said they would be unable to give up their burgers, pizzas and southern fried chicken.
The World Health Organization predicts there will be 2.3 billion overweight adults in the world by 2015 and more than 700 million of them will be obese.
I wonder how long it will be before every burger box …
… carries a health warning ?
bigjohn 
