What is deeply irrational to me is that we live in a system in which people can’t make many food choices because they can’t afford electricity, or their landlord hasn’t delivered a proper refrigerator for them, or they can’t pay their gas bill one month because it got really cold.
There are all of these reasons why fast food is a rational choice. If you’re working multiple jobs, if you just need to feed yourself, it actually is a pretty good choice. Fast food delivers a lot of calories, a lot of carbohydrates, a lot of sugar, really quickly. For those advertisements to assure black diners that whatever traumas that you have brought or your family brought, that will not happen here, is really, really important for understanding the popularity of fast food.Īnd then the second part of it, in terms of what the food provides-in some instances, they had a captive market, or a market that understood the food experience as more practical than an indulgence. Even if it’s not fine dining and even if the food isn’t particularly amazing, the fact that you know you can walk into this place without any fear of intimidation or violence, and the manager is black and the person who owns it is black, is no small thing, nationally. So for a number of people who are entering a place like McDonald’s in 1975, it’s still kind of a big deal.
I was in my 30s.” Or “We didn’t go places. In some of my early research while thinking about a book about food and civil rights, I would talk to older African Americans about dining out, and they would say, “I remember the first time I went to a restaurant. But by the mid 1970s, when a black consumer is going to a restaurant, they have only been federally protected to do so for about a decade.
When we look back at some of the old appeals to black consumers, they are very problematic from 2020 perspectives.
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