Neither the fancy restaurant nor the fast food restaurant is optimizing for nutrition.
However, the fast food restaurant is optimizing for cost, while maintaining acceptable taste. The fancy restaurant, though, is probably serving food that is in some way traditional (else it would be Weird, not Fancy; there are exceptions of course); that is, there is a long history of people eating it. I have heard (no sources, sorry) that any particular traditional cuisine tends to be reasonably healthful [compared to what? I forget], presumably because people have been successful living off it.
So given that, the fancy restaurant is likely to serve more nutritious food.
(I think the weakest link in this is whether the average fancy restaurant does, in fact, serve traditional-in-that-sense food, and whether the presumable skew towards the particularly appealing, rather than typical, food of that cuisine opposes this effect.)
California cuisine in particular can get expensive, and one of its hallmarks is the inventiveness of the chef in combining fresh ingredients into a new dish. So you’re probably right that expensive French or expensive Italian is mostly traditional food, but there are other cuisines that aren’t like that.
That’s the type of exception I had in mind. Of course, “fresh” says something about the nature of the food too. (Unless you mean “novel” as opposed to “recently alive”.)
Neither the fancy restaurant nor the fast food restaurant is optimizing for nutrition.
However, the fast food restaurant is optimizing for cost, while maintaining acceptable taste. The fancy restaurant, though, is probably serving food that is in some way traditional (else it would be Weird, not Fancy; there are exceptions of course); that is, there is a long history of people eating it. I have heard (no sources, sorry) that any particular traditional cuisine tends to be reasonably healthful [compared to what? I forget], presumably because people have been successful living off it.
So given that, the fancy restaurant is likely to serve more nutritious food.
(I think the weakest link in this is whether the average fancy restaurant does, in fact, serve traditional-in-that-sense food, and whether the presumable skew towards the particularly appealing, rather than typical, food of that cuisine opposes this effect.)
California cuisine in particular can get expensive, and one of its hallmarks is the inventiveness of the chef in combining fresh ingredients into a new dish. So you’re probably right that expensive French or expensive Italian is mostly traditional food, but there are other cuisines that aren’t like that.
That’s the type of exception I had in mind. Of course, “fresh” says something about the nature of the food too. (Unless you mean “novel” as opposed to “recently alive”.)
The “fresh” in California cuisine is about “recently alive”, though “novel” is often part of the experience as well.