“Our food comes from all natural ingredients, made fresh every day!” There was a time when you could expect to hear a phrase like this only at Farmer Markets, and not at a local Taco Tico truck. Yet such monstrous claims are not only made, but flaunted every day with total impunity. Such has been the rape, pillage, plunder, and bastardization of the term that 'fresh' could now most nearly mean: 'put together by a human being'.
Our faithful online dictionary gives the two prime definitions as follows: 1. Newly made or obtained 2. newly arrived; just come. So it's understandable the such lingo could be distorted and warped to fit quite literally anything that is served to you in any context. Ever. Therefore, when you peel back that slim jim wrapper, it's fresh. When you crack into those lunchables, they're fresh. As soon as you pull that frozen hotdog out of its packaging to let it thaw in the sink, mmm, that's fresh. In fact, when you first bring back home some printer ink and sticky notes from Office Depot, they're as fresh as the Prince of Bel-Air.
Unsurprisingly, fast food chains have been some of the first and most greedy and aggressive offenders in eroding the original connotations of the word, which could conjure up images of things living, green, and healthy. So when you hear the familiar jargon “all our items are made fresh in store everyday,” a bell should go off in your head. Wait a second. That means absolutely nothing. She has in essence assured you that they don't use discarded or half-eaten french fries from the previous day.
What's the current state of fast food?
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