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1. With the world/food system's intention to hide the truth from us, why dont we take more actions to demand to know more about the food we are eating and about its origin?

2. What is the reason for the rapid growth of fast food industry when in fact we know fast food is not good for our health?

3. Why do you think the U.S. control such a large percentage of beef and other products? Is it because of the myterious line of productions?

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Richard Lobb: National Chicken Council

Troy Roush: Vice president of corn growers association

CAFO: Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation

BPI: Beef Products Incorporation; Elton Roth is the Founder

Maria Andrea Gonzales: comes from low income family of 4, and has to make the decision between her husband's medication and healthy food.

Joel Salatin: Pollyface farmer owner

Monsanto Corporation in Missouri with 75 devoted investigators and farmers.

"Corn" mainfood for animals.

Allan Trenkle: Ruminant Nutrition Expert Iowa State University

Tony Airoso: Wal-mart's chief

Environmental problems, food shortage, the use of oil, man power,etc.

Tabacco industries as example

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The latest entrant is McDonald's, the fast-food giant, which has restaurants in more than 100 countries and will open its first Vietnam location on Saturday in downtown Ho Chi Minh City.

Vietnam has a surging middle class, and most of its 90 million citizens were born after the Vietnam War ended, in 1975. Many young Vietnamese are insatiably curious about foreign cuisine and culture, like kebabs and K-pop, and the McDonald's opening has been widely discussed on Vietnamese websites in recent weeks.

KFC opened in Vietnam in 1997, two years after the country normalized relations with the United States. But not until 2010 did American brands begin to enter Vietnam's market in earnest. They still trail Asian brands by a large margin. American-style Asian fast-food chains, like Lotteria from South Korea and Jollibee from the Philippines, have slowly introduced restaurants in a few major cities. Two Vietnamese coffee chains - Highlands Coffee and Trung Nguyen - have also made a splash in a market dominated by mom-and-pop cafes.

It was inevitable, consultants said, that more American brands would enter the country once the economics looked more appealing. Vietnam's per capita income rose to $1,550 in 2012 from $1,000 in 2008, according to World Bank estimates, and inflation has stabilized.

"It's got a big population, the government is making it easier to enter," said Ralf Matthaes, managing director for Vietnam and the Mekong region at TNS Global, a British market-research consulting firm, "and Vietnamese are now having that basic income level where there is not just sustainability but genuine opportunity for growth and profits."

McDonald's waited a long time to open in Vietnam, given its global brand recognition and likely appeal to young Vietnamese consumers. When it did, it tagged Henry Nguyen, the son-in-law of Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, as its local franchisee.

Bill Hayton, a former foreign correspondent in Vietnam and the author of "Vietnam: Rising Dragon," a 2010 book that explored links between money and power in the one-party state, said: "Laws and regulations are often rather vaguely written, giving officials plenty of opportunity to delay or assist an investor's plans, but Mr. Nguyen has been able to negotiate these difficulties with ease. Having the second-most-powerful man in the country as father-in-law is like having a golden ticket and get-out-jail-free card all rolled into one."

A representative for McDonald's declined requests for a meeting or telephone interview with Mr. Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American business tycoon who moved to the United States as a child and returned with degrees from Harvard and Northwestern University to run the Vietnam office of IDG Ventures, a network of venture capital funds based in San Francisco.

In a statement, Liam Jeory, a McDonald's vice president for corporate relations, wrote: "The contract with Henry Nguyen as developmental licensee is the result of a rigorous selection process that began years ago. Nguyen brings a strong passion for the brand that he developed while working as a part-time crew member for McDonald's as a young student in the United States."

Food industry experts say McDonald's and other American fast-food brands typically market themselves in Asia as a lifestyle choice for the middle class, rather than as an inexpensive option for the poor, and that their Vietnam strategy is no exception.

Meals at a Burger King on Lo Duc Street in Hanoi were selling the other day for 65,000 dong ($3) - twice what Nguyen Thi Hang Nga charges for a bowl of pho in her restaurant across the street, where patrons sit on blue plastic stools.

"That food may be tasty, but it's expensive for normal Vietnamese," Ms. Nga said of the American company's offerings.

A 2012 report by the market forecaster Euromonitor International predicted that Vietnam's food service industry would grow to $670 million in 2015, from $383 million in 2010, according to Lucia Vancura of Promar Consulting, a firm in Tokyo that advises on food and agriculture. However, she said, the exact parameters of "fast food" were not clearly defined in the forecast.

Virginia Ferguson, a spokeswoman in Kentucky for Yum Brands, the parent company of KFC and Pizza Hut, said KFC grew quickly after its 1997 opening because it was the first of its kind in Vietnam. KFC now has 134 Vietnam locations, and Pizza Hut, which opened a decade later, has 34.

Baskin-Robbins and Dunkin' Donuts, which opened in Vietnam in 2012 and 2013, now have a combined 18 locations. The two brands plan together to open 60 to 80 locations each year in Southeast Asia.

The coffee giant Starbucks, which opened its first three stores in Vietnam last year, all in Ho Chi Minh City, said the company planned to open in Hanoi in 2014. "For us, the Vietnam market is a huge opportunity, and we're taking a long-term view on how we build our business there the right way," said John Culver, the company's president for China and Asia-Pacific.

Industry experts say that although Vietnam's fast-food market is far from saturated, multinationals trying to expand their operations face logistical challenges.

One is finding affordable and central sites in the smallish downtown areas of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, where competition is fierce and monthly rents in prime locations can reach as much as $19 a square foot, according to Richard Leech, executive director at the Vietnam office of CBRE, a real estate consulting firm based in Los Angeles. He said fast-food companies in Ho Chi Minh City typically sought to pay about $6 a square foot.

Another obstacle is establishing an efficient food distribution and refrigeration network that extends into second-tier cities.

Some international companies have found they need to adapt their food to local tastes. The South Korean bakery chain Paris Baguette offers multiple variations on the banh mi, a Vietnamese sandwich that typically includes sliced pork and sprigs of cilantro. KFC serves rice and seafood alongside its fried chicken, and both Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts brew beverages to appeal to the Vietnamese penchant for extra-sweet coffee.

Nguyen Hoang Anh, the 23-year-old who loves fast food, said before lunch on a recent weekday that he welcomed American brands to Vietnam, partly because he had never liked Vietnamese food very much. He said eating hamburgers and fried chicken reminded him of living in Australia, where he earned a degree three years ago in design and visual communications.

"It's not as complex - it doesn't have many mixed flavors, like Vietnamese food," Mr. Anh said.

Nguyen Thi My Hao, his girlfriend, shook her head and said Mr. Anh's fast-food habit was a disappointment to his mother.

Correction: February 12, 2014

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McDonald's Opens in Vietnam, Bringing Big Mac to Fans of Banh Mi

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The latest entrant is McDonald's, the fast-food giant, which has restaurants in more than 100 countries and will open its first Vietnam location on Saturday in downtown Ho Chi Minh City. Vietnam has a surging middle class, and most of its 90 million citizens were born after the Vietnam War ended, in 1975.

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In " Why Healthy Eaters Fall for Fries " (news analysis, Sunday Review, June 30), it is suggested that people often choose the less healthy choice out of "vicarious goal fulfillment" or "hyperbolic discounting."

But in today's out-of-control environment, many people choose as much from a sense of self-control as from a sense of being out of control.

While fatty foods may be "comfort food," the primary driver for these choices is the restoration of a sense of control. If a person can take control for 30 minutes of his day, it could be a small window of peace and contentment even if it negatively affects his health.

JAMES MATHRUSSE
Bellevue, Wash., June 30, 2013
To the Editor:
As a gluten-free, fairly healthy eater living in New York City, I know that I've compromised my healthful choices long before I walk into a fast-food restaurant. Sometimes I'm even on a mission - to get a Frosty or French fries - and when I'm at the register, the calorie counts on the menu are not going to deter me.

What I'd like to see is a study on Pret A Manger or Whole Foods and how they encourage their customers to buy healthy foods. The nutrition expert Marion Nestle says restaurants "are not social service agencies; they're places that are trying to make money by selling food." True, private companies are not social service agencies, but many private companies do the world a lot of good, and they're usually more effective than the restaurant "social service agencies" with their calorie counts on the menu.

EMILY COLLINS
Washington, July 1, 2013
To the Editor:
There is a much simpler explanation for why consumers don't choose the healthy options at fast-food restaurants: they taste terrible. Have you ever tried a salad from McDonald's? Iceberg lettuce, underripe tomatoes and sad cucumbers that all taste the same, like Styrofoam.

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Opinion | The Lure of the Fast-Food Menu

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In " Why Healthy Eaters Fall for Fries " (news analysis, Sunday Review, June 30), it is suggested that people often choose the less healthy choice out of "vicarious goal fulfillment" or "hyperbolic discounting." But in today's out-of-control environment, many people choose as much from a sense of self-control as from a sense of being out of control.

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If unhealthy food is wrong, restaurant visitors apparently don't want to be right.

McDonald's chief executive officer, Donald Thompson, said recently that although the chain had devoted one-sixth of its advertising time to salads, they make up 2 to 3 percent of sales, and don't drive growth. Perhaps it would make more sense to give consumers vegetables by stuffing them inside McWraps, Mr. Thompson said.

And while restaurants try lower-calorie options - an egg-white sandwich here, a turkey burger there - the unhealthy stuff is "what consumers order - it's, quite frankly, on them," said Darren Tristano, executive vice president at Technomic, a food-industry consulting firm.

Gavan J. Fitzsimons, a professor who studies consumer psychology at Duke's Fuqua School of Business, has researched the disconnect.

In studies, he has presented participants with a range of menu choices - sometimes just unhealthy items, sometimes neutral items (like a fish sandwich) and sometimes healthy choices like salad. It turned out that including a healthy option did change people's behavior - by making them eat more unhealthily.

"When you put a healthy option up there on an otherwise unhealthy menu, not only do we not pick it, but its presence on the menu leads us to swing over and pick something that's worse for us than we normally would," Mr. Fitzsimons said.

Why? Mr. Fitzsimons called the phenomenon "vicarious goal fulfillment." By seeing a healthy menu option at a restaurant, "it basically satisfies that goal to be healthy," he said, and gives consumers leeway to order what they want.

And health-conscious eaters are the most susceptible to picking unhealthy items when the menu also has healthy ones. "It's often the ones raising their hands, saying they would pick the salad, those are the ones that are the most at risk when they walk in," he said.

The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but so, apparently, is the road to high cholesterol.

It's a conflict the Nobel-winning economist Thomas C. Schelling described in his book " Choice and Consequence ": "People behave sometimes as if they had two selves, one who wants clean lungs and long life and another who adores tobacco, or one who wants a lean body and another who wants dessert," he wrote. "The two are in continual contest for control."

Even when consumers are explicitly told the calories a food contains, it doesn't change their behavior much.

Brian Elbel, an assistant professor of population health and health policy at New York University's School of Medicine, studied consumer behavior before and after the city required chain restaurants to post calorie counts in 2008.

He found that 54 percent of respondents in New York City said they noticed the calorie labeling. Of those, less than a quarter said they ate fewer calories as a result.

BUT their behavior did not, in fact, change. When Dr. Elbel analyzed consumers' receipts, he found that there was no difference in calories consumed, whether people said they responded to the calorie counts or not. Consumers may be engaging in what behavioral economists call hyperbolic discounting, he said. "It's just easier to imagine what this is going to feel like now, and harder to think through what it feels like later," he said.

When New York City financed another study after the calorie labeling went into effect, over all, the study found no difference in calories consumed before and after the labeling requirement. But there were specific changes.

While just 15 percent of customers said they used the calorie information, those who did ate 106 fewer calories than those who didn't. Some chains like McDonald's and KFC saw significant reductions. But at Subway, which nutrition experts say has one of the healthier menus around, and where a higher-than-average percentage of customers said they read calorie information, the number of calories consumed actually increased, from 749 to 882. The researchers hypothesized this was because Subway was promoting $5 footlong subs at the time, and economic incentives trumped healthy intentions.

"What we're learning from what's happening in the industry is, consumers don't see fast food as a place to eat healthy," said Mr. Tristano, the food consultant. "It's indulgence that's important."

Researchers are thinking of new ways to signal nutritional value: how much exercise it would take to burn off a menu item, symbols like traffic lights, or educational campaigns on understanding calories.

But they are not leaving it up to the restaurants.

"They're not social service agencies - they're places that are trying to make money by selling food. That's their business," said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. "Sugar, salt and fat sells."

As Mr. Thompson of McDonald's put it, "We're in this time period where people are defining - quote-unquote - healthy and non-healthy, and the question really is, in the restaurant business, what does the customer want?" he said.

For Hannah Terry-Whyte, an Australian food blogger visiting the United States last week, it wasn't so much the indulgence she was after as the cultural experience when she ordered the doughnut breakfast sandwich.

"As an Australian, that, to me, is such the epitome of crazy American food behavior that I kind of had to try it," she said.

Still, even she wasn't immune to its meat-and-sugar seductiveness. Asked if she would try it again, she said, "You know what? Maybe. Yeah. Probably."

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Opinion | Why Healthy Eaters Fall for Fries

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If unhealthy food is wrong, restaurant visitors apparently don't want to be right. McDonald's chief executive officer, Donald Thompson, said recently that although the chain had devoted one-sixth of its advertising time to salads, they make up 2 to 3 percent of sales, and don't drive growth.

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'Burgernomics': Behind Today's Fast Food

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McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's are facing slow growth and disgruntled employees while also competing against new chains that are eating into their market share.

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Eating is definitely an essential part on our everyday schedule, so it is very important to know about our food; it is our responsibility to find out about the hidden fact to have better health as well as to be able to enjoy the happiness and the superior quality that food brings us.