Fast Food Globalization in the Provincial Philippines

Few contemporary societies remain beyond the global reach of today’s fast food industry. In both profound and subtle ways, this style of cuisine and the corporate brands that promote it have effectively transformed the appetites, health profiles, and consumer sensibilities of millions the world over. To better understand the variegated impact of McDonald’s and other national and international quick-service eateries on local life within a non-western urban context, Ty Matejowsky offers readers a highly engaging and granular account detailing the rise and popularity of these American-style chains throughout the Philippines. In Fast Food Globalization in the Provincial Philippines, Matejowsky examines the rich, diverse, and decidedly syncretic food traditions of the Philippines, one of the few global markets where industry giant McDonald’s lags behind in competition with an indigenous chain. Drawing on over twenty years of ethnographic fieldwork in two provincial Philippine cities—Dagupan City, Pangasinan and San Fernando City, La Union—Matejowsky has crafted one of the few anthropological accounts of fast food production and consumption within the socioeconomic milieu of a less-developed country. By turns critically engaged and highly reflexive, he examines many of the historical, political, economic, and sociocultural complexities that characterize the Philippines’ now thriving fast food scene. Amid intersections of post-colonial resistance, retail indigenization, corporatized childhood experiences, and rising “globesity,” Matejowsky considers the myriad ways this seemingly ubiquitous dining format is reimagined by industry players and everyday Filipinos to create something that is both intimately familiar and entirely new.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Fast Food as Global Metaphor: Sociocultural Perspectives on Fast Food Globalization 1970s–2010s Chapter 2: Of Burgers and Bees: Corporate Fast Food in the Philippines 1980s–2010s Chapter 3: A Tale of Two Local Fast Food Scenes: Corporate Fast Food in Dagupan City, Pangasinan and San Fernando City, La Union 1980s–2010s Chapter 4: The Young and the Hungry: Fast Food and Children 2000s–2010s Chapter 5: Jollibesity? Intersections of Fast Food, Health, Nutrition, and Obesity 2000s–2010s

About the Author :
Ty Matejowsky is associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Central Florida.

Review :
Ty Matejowsky's new book skillfully weaves together his personal experiences of eating and researching fast food in provincial Philippines, with powerful arguments about the region's uncanny ability to co-opt outside influences, including corporate fast food businesses. Readers will relate to this very engaging book, and at the same time, find in it an intellectually challenging analysis of how global economic processes have impacted local life in Southeast Asia. A fascinating case study of a peculiar locality with astounding global implications, this book focuses on the spread of fast food and its consequences in the Philippines, but it also explains the odd rivalry between Jollibee and McDonalds in my own Californian city, and indeed the interaction of indigenous foodways with corporate burgers everywhere on the planet. Anyone who has ever taken refuge in a foreign country at a Western-style fast food eatery to escape the heat, the grime or the loud cacophany of urban Asia will find this book a satisfying analysis. By exploring the ethnographic terrain between the universal features of corporate fast food and how they diverge, mesh and otherwise are transformed by local popular cultures and tastes, Ty Matejowsky has written a book that any undergraduate in the U.S. will find a compelling read. This carefully observed ethnographic study moves beyond the well-known presence of fast food chains such as McDonald’s in global cities and tourist destinations around the world to examine the negotiation of food and modernity in provincial towns of the Philippines. In doing so it makes a highly original contribution to the scholarship on globalization.