When it comes to our food system, the current U.S. tariff situation facing the country has forced consumers to ask themselves questions about how they will buy groceries depending on where they are produced or grown.
It’s a moment to reflect more broadly on beliefs and assumptions about what and how we eat and on the actions we take in order to do that.
First off, of course, people will make decisions that best suit their family’s needs. That only makes sense.
However, re-evaluating your approach to food and eating can be healthy at the same time it can be enlightening: what do I support when I purchase food? Where is the food coming from? What quality it is? Who are the farmers, producers and workers involved? Is this a local business?
Visiting a restaurant has the same implications. People often ask on various social media platforms: “Where can I get a cheap meal? An inexpensive burger”?
That seems simple enough, but when you start thinking about it the issue is a fairly complex one, to which I will add a saying: “You can have it fast, you can have it good, you can have it cheap: pick two.”
The little ditty, perhaps most commonly used in business management, is variously referred to as the “iron triangle” or the “triple-constraint triangle.”
For everyone from project managers to industrial designers to software developers, the triangle (also taking the form of a nifty Venn diagram) is a signifier of the struggle between those often-opposing forces of quality, speed and cost which are always aligned with the food we eat.
Let’s consider just a little bit of the history of the ubiquitous “fast food.”
Cheap and fast food was available in North America and especially the United States – pennies for a hamburger – as early as the 1920s, but its full-blown impact, interestingly, coincides with the ascent of wider North American car culture.
The post-World War II era’s booming economy saw automobiles became more affordable and more widely produced.
As journalist and food activist Michael Pollan has stated, at about the same time, supper became a moveable feast as it shifted from the dining room table at home and onto the road.
Pollan notes in his various books and explains quite well that as the network of roads and highways evolved and intensified, restaurants popped up at basket-weaves and highway interchanges.
As he describes it, at those points near the highway on-ramp, you didn’t even have to get out of your car to have a meal: at a drive-in restaurant, a burger, fries and a shake appeared at your car window in mere minutes.
Here’s where car and quick-service restaurant (QSR) food align: we can thank (or not) car-maker Henry Ford and factory production-line food preparation, concepts of uniformity, centralized food management, pre-cooking and the objective that faster was better.
Those same principles are at play, via economies of scale and rigid cost controls, in keeping QSR food some of the cheapest possible – a recent special at a multi-national burger joint where I live featured a burger, a pack of fries and a drink for only $10. That’s pretty cheap.
Concepts of volume, standardization, inexpensive mass-produced (and lesser quality) ingredients, outsourcing and relative minimal labour costs are responsible.
So, yes, relatively inexpensive food can be served quickly, but the question remains: is it good?
While fast, good and cheap all have relative value– that is, you might find it inexpensive and delicious; someone else may not – the nature of its basic and minimal preparation, usually with little nutritional value added, can be an argument that it is not “good” on several levels.
Assume that achieving “good” when it comes to food requires an investment of time: the product – a freshly ground, hand-formed hamburger that, let’s say, blends beef and pork – will necessarily have to be more expensive for the end user who purchases it.
The patty is not a uniform, frozen disk that was extruded in a massive factory someone hundreds of kilometres away but is ground at the restaurant (or comes from a local butcher who has added value to the ingredient), stored, seasoned, portioned, formed and grilled by a restaurant cook.
Add to that a freshly toasted bun that the restaurant makes (perhaps over the course of two days) and the condiments and sauces that another cook makes in-house as well.
The care and attention – not to mention the freshness, I can guarantee you – will result in a burger that the majority of eaters will agree tastes better and therefore is “good” and perhaps even surpasses a burger you might make with your labour and ingredients at home for your summer barbecues.
In the moment at the restaurant, the reality is that this hand-made burger is not going to take much longer to prepare after you order it, though it could be considered “quick” compared to, say, cooking a more complex dish on the menu that has several components.
Because the burger has so many more points at which value has been added – and has better ingredients – it will cost more. Although the burger is relatively fast, it will cost more – and certainly more than a fast-food burger at your favourite QSR.
Many of us look for food that is good and affordable. But good food is not – nor should it be – necessarily “cheap.”
Answering that previously posed question of where to get “cheap food” requires thinking about how the three triangle elements work together and should prompt a thought or two in us about the values and “picks” that guide choice.
Food writer Andrew Coppolino lives in Rockland. He is the author of “Farm to Table” and co-author of “Cooking with Shakespeare.” Follow him on Instagram @andrewcoppolino.
