Content Warning: food disorders and non-vegan food. Also a bunch of anecdotal pseudoscience on my part.
Prefacing this by saying that besides being autistic, I also have ADHD and mild lactose intolerance.
There's this common saying that food affects mental health, but I feel that most people don't actually delve into how that affects hypersensitive people. It's not just some ethereal gut-to-brain communication, in my experience the simple physical feeling of being too full or a bit hungry, or having slow digestion due to fatty food can be very distracting and even impact my mood. This is even part of my crackpot theory that autistic people aren't actually that much more susceptible to lactose intolerance, only that it's more noticeable as all my lactose intolerant NT acquaintances only notice that something is wrong when getting severely sick.
And on the other hand, it's a well known fact that fatty foods, sweets and milk derivatives can be very addictive. Couple that with their mass production and marketing, as well as being shaped, textured and flavoured in a way that seems intent on catching as many autistic people, and you get yourself a brand new addiction.
Now in the case of my country, it turns out that those aren't actually the cheapest food, unlike the USA. Fruits, vegetables, and their derivatives are actually much cheaper. That means that, when buying something from McDonald's, I harm both my physical and mental health as well as my wallet. There is no benefit to it except for the short-lived pleasure of bland paste-like burgers and fake cheddar cream. Technically I enjoy bland pasty food, but I already make my own soylent-like paste meal which is much cheaper and healthier. Then why do I keep buying it, specially in stressful times? The answer is clearly addiction.
Obviously I'm not the first one to point out that industrial fast food is addictive (just google "McDonald's Addictive"), but I want to make a broader point here. It is not only addictive, but socially normalised to the point where it is 1)legal, 2)heavily marketed and 3)enforced on children. There is no stigma to eating industrial fast food, in fact it's treated as some reward or place for celebration for families with children. And now with giant delivery app corporations, every time one tries to get some normal meal, the big M (or their siblings such as Subway or KFC) is there with yet another sale (that isn't even that cheap) enticing you to let opium burgers into your home. It is exploitative to the factory workers, the kitchen staff, the deliverypeople, but also to every person with poor impulse control, which I suspect is a large portion of their clients.
In fact, before I uninstalled the app iFood (our version of Uber Eats), it seemed to know exactly at which days of the week and time I'd be the most stressed, and therefore susceptible to their marketing. What began as a cool way to get cheap meals became a money and health sink. This is so obviously predatory, and yet I can't even think of how to express it to people aren't already autistic commies like me, and how that clown Ronald should definitely get the wall.
I hyperbolically propose that the "junk food" addiction epidemic is comparable to the alcohol or other drug epidemics of the past, but still gets a pass because NT people are often completely unaware of how their brains (or ours) can easily be exploited by this shit. I've walked towards a chain while being fully convinced that I was only harming myself, but eaten there anyways, and I'm pretty sure this is a telltale addiction sign. Quitting coffee was much easier than this.
Food is one of the most basic human necessities. We should not, as the most developed animal society in the world, be fighting against our own sources of food to maintain our survival. And that is not even getting into how this food is intentionally put into a situation of fake scarcity to keep profits high despite all the hunger and food insecurity.
I'm trying to gather all energy so that I can to drop literally every industrial food and live off of only grains, beans, rices, tubers and a fuckton of fruit (and maybe some eggs if the vegan police doesn't nab me). That is what peak performance looks like, as every creator divinity intended us to be. Except they didn't consider you can make it pasty (and therefore superior) with a pressure cooker.
TL;DR: Every fast food CEO and stockholder should be locked in a prison where the only thing they have to eat is deep-fried hamburgers, while surrounded by multiple colourful photoshopped pictures of those same burgers. Let's see how they enjoy it then.
Feel free to add your own perspectives, specially if they contradict mine (and even more so if you're also neurodiverse) so I can get a bigger picture.