Did you eat yet? It’s the Chinese way of asking how are you—it is not a curiosity about what you ate, or when you ate it, but a compassionate concern that you have had your basic needs met. The reply: that you ate or that you didn’t wholly supersedes the necessity to ask about your mental well-being. It is the story of a people who in their long history know the pain of starvation, poverty and war. The hidden message is that as long as you ate, you are fine. The modern salutation that asks of your feelings is one reflecting a social attitude where food should become either a banal chore of life requiring one to take time away from increasing shareholder value to tend to bodily obligations, a brief respite between more important things, or an extravagant affair used primarily as a social tool.
For almost all of human history food scarcity determined interspecies survival and formed the basis of civilization. Metabolism embodies the characteristic of life which must struggle and continue forward, through domination and continuous learning. So as a primal motivator, its cultural significance ranges from viking celebratory feasts to metaphors in modern slang, such as “you cooked”, or “get the bread”, conflating the concept of food with success. You are what you eat—not just in the chemical makeup, but in our expression of culture, our health and togetherness.
However, in recent decades, we have completely changed our relationship with food. The fast food industry, which accounts for 11% of daily calorie intake and up to 5% of household income for Americans, is the process by which rationalization and scientific management extend into our identity. The sandwich—a typology enabling speed in preparation and consumption by the simultaneity of hybrid stacking—becomes the pervasive definition of food today. Fast food is the result of a society that does not have the time to consume each ingredient individually and instead relies on a synchrony of flavours becoming the mundane. The contemporary paradigm of fast food described by George Ritzer in The McDonaldization of Society contains four components: efficiency, calculability, predictability and control. This logic insists on the economic calculus between input cost and value derived, allowing standardization across locales to create brand loyalty, tightly managed inputs and streamlined labour.
Globalization and food security among majorities in developed countries have also deemphasized the ritual of eating and realigned it with the prevailing ethic of reasoned profit. The industry strategically shifted to cater to the bureaucratic motivations that exploit and transform established modes of nourishment into lunch breaks that become multipurpose networking events and the ubiquitous “to-go” option that absorbs dining into the workplace. Increasingly more of our meals are eaten without thinking; by purchasing ready-to-go options we avoid obligations associated with “dining”. A restaurant is not a place for nourishment—it’s a space for social growth and expression (and often online prestige), but that means in all other cases, like when we are alone or otherwise occupied, food is no more than a quick sandwich or a trip to the local store. Traditional and local preferences are at once defeated by the marketing, convenience and competitive pricing of uniform alternatives. It is not even that they are unhealthy; dozens of salad brands sold on the premise of the convenient “better” option remove our last resistance against the acceleration of food: our own guilt.
One food item is emblematic of this acceleration: the egg. “Go to work on an egg” was a slogan invented by the British Egg Marketing Board to uphold the egg industry during a sales decline and used throughout the 60s to firmly cement the egg as a modern breakfast item (where many other elements of the English breakfast had been left behind), in service of course, to a better productivity at the more consequential predicate of “work”. The breakfast sandwich, inaugurated by the universally recognizable Egg McMuffin is the final evolution of this ingredient taking centre stage within systems that streamline the farm-to-mouth pipeline. The Teflon-coated metal rings that gave the egg its cylindrical form are a testament to the desire for an identical and recognizable product, and a formal representation of the times: an organic ingredient enjoyed by humans for centuries bounded and rapidly produced with geometric efficiency.
The success of the Egg McMuffin invaded a newly created breakfast market and replaced the one moment of familial gathering before going off to work or school with a dependable, trendy and portable option. Within four years of the breakfast menu’s launch, these items accounted for 18% of total McDonald’s sales, and in ten years, McDonald’s breakfasts accounted for 25% of all restaurant breakfasts. And the absurdity is—these were marketed as giving you more time by saving the inconvenience of cooking yourself. Not only was it sold as the better breakfast option, it was the better option for your day.
McDonald’s had already been an American cultural phenomenon but it was the breakfast on, and later the all-day breakfast menu that entrenched our intimacy with and reliance on globalized and standardized eating. At the same time, with egg and poultry carefully calibrated for output, the distribution of food became further alienated from our experience. Demand for the same foods every day independent of geographic location fabricated an artificial exoskeleton around the chicken. This cyborg transfigured the chicken’s imperfect biological anatomy to a precise egg-laying machine by attaching the chicken’s reproductive and digestive tract to the supply chain. It is the reflection of a sum total of biological, infrastructural, and commercial innovations that decide our lifestyle. The shift of food from sustenance to its dual function of a bureaucratic social alibi and rapid caloric intake is monumental yet under the shadow of technological transformations it feels almost intuitive. Often the way we are presented with our food encourages us to enjoy it while accomplishing something more meaningful, and the forces that scale our consumption have also succeeded in accelerating it.
Today the answer to “did you eat yet” is always yes—there was an Egg McMuffin on the way to work, a sandwich at the desk, something grabbed between more important things. We have eaten. But are we fine?
Gallagher, Brian. “McDonald’s Is Bigger Than Ever: How ‘Super Size Me’ Lost the Culture War.” The New York Times, May 12, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/12/dining/super-size-me-mcdonalds-fast-food.html.
Kroc, Ray; Anderson, Robert (1992). Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald`s. St. Martin's Press.
Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society: 20th Anniversary Edition. SAGE, 2013.
The Independent. “Len Fulford: Director behind the ‘Go to Work on an Egg’ and Guinness ‘Toucan’ Commercials.” The Independent, December 30, 2011. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/len-fulford-director-behind-the-go-to-work-on-an-egg-and-guinness-toucan-commercials-6282930.html.
Turner, Bryan S. (2003). "McDonaldization: Linearity and Liquidity in Consumer Cultures". American Behavioral Scientist.
余胜前. “余胜前专.” 说说“你吃了吗”背后的中国精神与文化自信 -- 七一网, February 19, 2024. https://m.12371.gov.cn/content/2024-02/19/content_458727.html.