One of the great tricks fast food (and fast casual) companies have managed to play on unwitting consumers is making it seem like the food isn’t that bad for you. Sometimes this is accomplished through “the illusion of choice”; other times, by using marketing to emphasize words like “natural,” “organic,” and “antibiotic-free.” But occasionally a restaurant chain accidentally pulls back the curtain just a bit further than intended and reveals that, oh yeah, this food is absolutely loaded with sugar and we were fools to believe otherwise.
As reported by Mashed, this is exactly what happened at Chick-fil-A. The brand, hot off of an entirely separate scandal, is being dragged yet again thanks to an employee revealing in a now deleted TikTok video just how much sugar is added to Chick-fil-A’s lemonade. In the published screengrab we can see what appears to be an entire bucket of sugar being poured into a vat of what is presumably lemon juice, and Mashed reports that some consumers have sworn off the chain as a result.
But, look, this shouldn’t be news, nor should anyone be outraged. Thanks to an FDA law passed in 2018, any restaurant with more than 20 locations is required to provide consumers with a calorie count of all items sold, and Chick-fil-A’s nutrition information chart isn’t hard to track down online. Yes, the fact that its 410-gram lemonade contains a whopping 55 grams of sugar is sort of horrifying, and corporations should absolutely be held to a higher standard than they currently are. But, you now, it’s lemonade from a fast food chicken joint famous for its holier-than-thou attitude and discriminatory practices. Maybe the issue here isn’t the fact that it’s unhealthy, but rather that people who eat fast food don’t want to know how the sausage gets made.