A sunny Monday in Almere, earlier this summer. It is break time at the Akhnaten, a pre-vocational secondary school in Almere-Stad. Groups of students stroll towards the mall. First they pass a row of shawarma and grill restaurants that are still closed. Then snack bar Lekker & Co, the vegetarian Turkish chain Çigköftem and Schep Taart en Gebak.
The KFC is 500 meters from the school. There they go into conclave. Next door is the Burger King. And they can also go to Five Guys hamburger restaurant. Or McDonald’s, just down the road. Or Frites Affairs, which leads the way with ‘Pssst, do you give in to your desires?’
The group splits up. A few guys go to Burger King, Jaïr chooses a snack box of 2.75 euros at KFC after long hesitation. He comes here “not often,” he says. “Twice a week or so.”
There is a lot of fast food available in the area. What do they think of that? “It’s my own money, isn’t it?” says a schoolboy with a black cap. “I can decide for myself what to do with it, can’t I?” Today, by the way, he is not going to the KFC. They are going to eat something healthy, says a friend of his: croissants at the bakery.
A Wednesday evening, earlier in the month. Opposite the KFC is a restaurant, the Volkskantine. Not for profit, with the aim of: good, affordable food as a basic provision. That place is an experiment by the Flevo Campus knowledge institute, which focuses on food issues. Tonight the Flevo Campus organized a debate here: should the government intervene against fast food?
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But what exactly is fast food and it’s not that bad to eat fries or a croquette sandwich every now and then, asks VVD councilor Koen Brokhorst. A teacher in the audience thinks Bronkhorst is putting up “smoke screens”. One fifth of the children in Almere are overweight. Then you should not pretend that fast food is not unhealthy and that people can choose wisely.
The first McDonald’s
What most attendees think: there is now a lot of unhealthy food on offer in the city. That is also what aldermen of other large cities think. They want government measures to stop the further advance of unhealthy food. State Secretary Maarten van Ooijen (Public Health, ChristenUnie) is now investigating the possibilities.
How did it come to this? Getting a quick bite was possible long before the first McDonald’s opened in 1971 in a new residential area in Zaandam. Director Lenno Munnikes of the Flevocampus shows a photo from the fifties: people are eating on the street in Amsterdam, there is waste everywhere. Fast food, he says, is not new, although it used to be called something different. The first vending machines with croquettes appeared in the 1960s. “The snack bar was booming at that time,” says Munnikes, “especially in Amsterdam.”
With McDonald’s, the American version of fast food came to the Netherlands. “An American diner,” called NRC Handelsblad that then, “where ready-to-eat foods were packaged in such a way that they could be consumed on the spot, but could also be taken home for consumption.”
From the 1980s, fast food really took off. After the rise of the burger, pizza became big in the 1990s. Fast food is now available from kitchens all over the world, from Korea to Mexico.
The supply continued to grow, except for a dip in the financial crisis. Over the past ten years, the number of fast food restaurants – from large chains to the snack bar on the corner – has increased by 12 percent, to 6,781 locations. This is apparent from data provided by market research agency Locatus, which maps all retail and hospitality real estate in the Netherlands. NRC shared.
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The number of places for takeaway and delivery grew even faster: a doubling in ten years, from more than 2,000 to 4,122 this year. The same applies to lunchrooms, which Subway falls under: that branch also almost doubled, to just under 4,000 locations. And then there are the newcomers: donut and waffle shops, whose most famous face is the American Dunkin’ Donuts (now called Dunkin’). In 2012, Locatus didn’t have one, now just under a hundred. Coffee shops, including Starbucks, also grew explosively (now almost 600). You can argue about whether coffee, donuts and sandwiches are fast food. It is clear that a large Cookie & Cream Frappuccino from Starbucks with 426 kilocalories already comes close to a Big Mac (525 kilocalories).
The growth of the fast food offer is not yet over. With the largest supply per inhabitant, Amsterdam seems saturated, but there is still room in cities such as The Hague and Ede. There is potential in locations with “a lot of schoolchildren, students and lower-income households,” concluded market researcher RetailSonar in June. In the big cities already at 77 percent of schools fast food within a five-minute walk, according to research by Locatus commissioned by the municipal project ‘Jongeren op Gezond Werken’.
No ready-made definition
If there are new regulations, the question will first have to be answered what fast food is. How do you determine what unhealthy food is? You would instinctively say: the pizza chains, the hamburger restaurants. But things quickly get slippery: because if Burger King is fast food, isn’t Burgermeester, a more expensive burger restaurant, too? And what to do with the sushi, falafel and wok restaurants?
There are no ready-made definitions. Institutions such as CBS and the Chamber of Commerce classify fast food as food that is quickly prepared and served and that is relatively cheap. But that says nothing about the nutritional value of the offer. In addition to speed, Locatus speaks of ‘mostly fried products’, but also includes wok restaurants as fast food, for example.
Even the Nutrition Center struggles with the definition issue. “Of course everyone knows that we usually mean snack bars and large hamburger chains,” said a spokesperson. “Healthy food, such as from salad bar SLA, can also be ‘fast’, but we usually don’t mean that when we talk about fast food.”
The big chains disagree. They say: there is enough healthy choice with us, what we sell you can not really call fast food. “We have been doing everything we can to make pizzas as healthy as possible for over ten years,” says Philippe Vorst, co-founder of New York Pizza, the largest pizza chain in the Netherlands after Domino’s with more than 250 locations. “We actually sell a sandwich with cheese and tomato sauce. What you put on it determines how healthy that sandwich is.” And McDonald’s offers ‘freedom of choice’, says spokesperson Eunice Koekkoek: the guest can choose, for example, between burger with fries or salad, cola without or with sugar, a Happy Meal with carrots or small fries. In her eyes, McDonald’s does not offer fast food. “How we see it: we are a family restaurant. In my view, fast food is fast, with little choice, which you can’t enjoy inside, for example.”
Resistance to culture of higher educated people
It is also important: how do citizens view this? The discussion – fast food or not? – is not value-free. Consciously or unconsciously, the term often already contains a judgment. A visitor will not easily say that he is going to eat fast food: he takes a bucket or goes to the Mac. And while the McDonald’s is a place for one person to enjoy a nice meal with friends or family for not too much money, the other would not want to be found dead. Then there are the concerned, highly educated health experts and politicians who label it ‘unhealthy’.
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There is a risk in all these negative views. Distinguishing between fast food and healthy food can be counterproductive, says sociology professor Jeroen van der Waal. At Erasmus University, he is researching why lower-educated people eat unhealthy food more often. Less money and knowledge about healthy food is only part of the explanation, there is also a sociological side to it. “Low-educated people experience that they are looked down upon, including their lifestyle.” This creates resistance to what he calls the ‘legitimate culture’ of the higher educated. “Quinoa and avocado are ridiculed. Lettuce is rabbit food.”
If you don’t connect very well with people’s perceptions, it will be difficult to motivate them to eat healthier, says Van der Waal. The fact that footballer Ronaldo removes bottles of Coca-Cola at a press conference and says “drink water” is much more effective for some target groups than a hundred government campaigns. “Eating fast food is also a way to rebel against the elite.”
They are aware of this at the Flevo Campus. In the Volkskantine, less fortunate residents of Almere can eat plant-based food for little money. “But young people are more likely to choose something that fits their expectations and then go to KFC.” That fits with their “food identity,” as Munnikes calls it. When he wants to get muscular guys inside, he doesn’t start about the importance of a healthy diet, but about increasing muscle strength with vegetable proteins. And even then it is difficult to get them over the threshold.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of 28 July 2022