Take it away!

I've lived with this Canadian guy for years. In fact I still live with him, given I married him and eventually followed him up North. And for years all I'd heard was how superior Canadian fast food was to the Australian; how there were more options, how even in rural towns you could get food at insane hours of the night, how the fast food was generally better. This was what I was told for years until we finally came to Canada for a visit. Abruptly the comments stopped; mostly because I called him on it in front of his family and he realised just how disparaging he'd been. That and I saw the truth of the situation for myself.

In a lot of ways he's right. There are a lot more choices of franchised fast food here, even in a comparitively small town such as I am living in. On almost every corner it seems there's a hamburger franchise or a doughnut franchise, or some other place where one can pour fat and sugar into oneself for a moderate fee. And there are so many choices; I think I can safely say that I could pick takeaway franchised food every night for over a fortnight and still have restaurants I hadn't visited.

Oh, here's a difference. In Australia - well, Melbourne, anyway - we call restaurant food bought to eat at home "takeaway". Up here, it's "takeout". A subtle difference, but one I have to accustom myself to.

In Australia, there aren't the huge numbers of franchises. In fact as I sit here I can only think of a few - McDonalds, Hungry Jacks (known as Burger King to the rest of the world), KFC, Subway and Red Rooster. For doughnut places we have Donut King and Krispy Kreme. For pizza there is Dominos and Pizza Hut.

It's at about this point that an Australian would puff up with pride, telling themselves that they can't be as fat and lazy as our Northern cousins; we don't have the plethora of fast food around, after all. Sorry guys, but while we don't have the institutionalised restaurant chains, we have fish 'n' chip shops aplenty; pizzarias agogo and all kinds of family run takeaway shops ranging from charcoal chicken to curries. There are few shop strips that don't have at least one place you can get hot and fast food.

Up here, an hour north of Toronto, I haven't found these much-lauded open-'til-2am fast food places yet though. We shall see how accurate he was.

So both Canada and Australia have the capacity to eat themselves into happy stupors. I don't know what happened to the family chains up here yet, and wonder if the same thing will happen Down Under. Aussies tended to be resistant to big chains, seeing them as invaders. Pizza Hut is being reduced to small express shops, and the last I heard Krispy Kreme is having to shut many of their outlets, but overall the trend is upward and outward. One of the concerns is (and has been since before I was a kid, I must add) that our culture is being subsumed by the American ideals we see portrayed in the media, and fast food goes hand in hand with that.

I think it's in how each culture is attempting to deal with the *gasp* OMG OBESITY CRISIS!!!!!!111 that the differences are really seen. However that's a topic for another post.