Feast Of (Junk) Food

I have something to admit.

I love fast food.

I love it more than the food my mom makes.

It's not like she makes bad food, its just that I prefer eating food that does me more harm than good.

As far as I remember, my first exposure to American fast food began with McDonald's.

Before that, I had no clue what a burger tasted or looked like.

And McDonald's was all the craze when it opened here.

Before McDonald's, if you went to an Indian restaurant thinking they served fast food, you'd have to come back disappointed because their version of fast food was, 'the food that people have when they fasted'.

I didn't care whether they were good or bad, I just cared for the toy that came with their Happy Meal.

And I had an awesome collection, which by now must be rotting in some dump-yard somewhere.

To me, McDonald's was the ideal image of how a burger should look like.

It all changed when I went to an american themed diner and tried their burger.

That's when I found out that McDonald's was nowhere close to how an actual burger should taste like.

I had forgotten that their objective was not to bring delicious burgers, but to sell people their version of an american delicacy.

But thanks to them burgers were all the range at many Indian households.

Even at my home, I tried making a burger once, all I needed was a burger bun, an aloo tikki, some mayo and it was done.

It did not taste the way a burger should taste like.

And after that I swore I would never make one at home again.

The homemade burger was the parents version of "why eat outside? we'll make one at home".

I guess it was some kind of challenge by McD to the parents on "Who can make the most shitty burger ever, you or us?"

The parents took the bait, and McD won.

All was going well for McDonald's until KFC dropped by.

And again people were surprised.

"Till now we all were used to eating tandoori chicken, so what's with this fried chicken thing? and why does it taste really good?".

Soon a whole new bunch of American fast food joints came up and McDonald's became just another name in the fast food industry.

Nowadays the popularity of fast food has risen to the point where all of them attempt to replicate their version of local dishes.

Though in India, thanks to the large population of rabbit food lovers, they just change their whole menu but not without adding one Indian dish to it.

Basically, its just a really spicy version of their dish, and has an Indianised name to it.

Now if you've lived in India for quite a long time, you know that Indian cuisine isn't all about spicy food, there's sour, there's sweet, there's also I-don't-know-what-the-hell-was-that, etc.

But what do they know, eh?

I mean, if I'm going to an American fast food joint, I want to experience what their food tastes like and not 'what our food would taste like if we put it in a bun'.

We have rotis for that and they do a far better job.

Well, no matter what they do or don't one thing's for sure:

I'll never stop eating fast food.