We may be drifting off the topic a bit here. Educating a small minority of people on good eating habits is a far cry from attempting to bring a fast food industry to its financial knees on behalf of the terminally ignorant and their rapacious lawyers.

You say you know these people. I submit, and would bet a week's salary, that any one of them you asked would be able to tell you that of course you can get fat from eating too much "junk" food. These people may be uneducated, but I'd bet most of them aren't that stupid.

They also know that if you are short of pocket money, a fast food burger for your kids is one hell of a lot better than nothing at all, and if they thought about it at all, they might even appreciate that there is a widely distributed source of reasonably priced and reasonably nutritious food that they can rely on. In the old days you could get room and board in the city for reasonable prices, before the Nob Hill types zoned the boarding houses out of existence because they didn't like Those Sorts Of People in their city.

Truckers, day workers, and others on the low end of the scale eat fast food not because they have any illusions that this is their best choice, but because it's convenient, cheap, and it works. Given even a reasonable discernment on the menu choices, it can even be nutritious enough to do the job without too much health penalty.

When I was working my way through college, I was dirt poor. No sympathy required, this was not something unusual for any student in similar circumstances. I couldn't go home for the summer because I had jobs, and when the dorms closed for the summer I had to find affordable lodgings anywhere I could. One summer, while I worked for an architect, I was staying in an upstairs room I rented from an old lady in her house. There was an enclave of stores near the U. of Minnesota collectively called "Dinkytown." I would go there early in the morning, and grab a sugary, fatty pastry from the bakery because that was the only thing open that early. Lunch, I would walk across the street from the architect's office to a nice restaurant which had a cheap soup and sandwich lunch special (probably good nutritionally). Supper I would be back in my room, and would go out and eat at the Burger King. Every night. All summer. I knew there was better food (Bridgeman's had better burgers, but for a lot more money) and when I got enough money to afford to rent one of those little tiny refrigerators, I could eat sandwich meat, but this worked for me and I didn't whine that I was being "forced" to eat bad food.

Of course, it helps when you can't afford a car. I biked everywhere, and in my college prime had legs that could probably have bicycled me up the side of the IDS building.

Boy, that sure ain't the case now.