Okay, I've got a bone to pick with McDonald's.
Bear in mind, I do not take my fast food lightly. I get nostalgic about the chain-chow I ingest and I'm disappointed to report that Ronald McDonald has fallen off the horse in terms of the places I'd choose to eat quick with little-to-no regard for my health as I trudge through my middle age.
Once upon my lifetime McD's was this side of gourmet food to me. Granted, these were my childhood years and the choices were basically the above and Burger King. I gotta give a shout out to Burger Chef and Hardees, two franchises that have in the case of BC completely disappeared and in the case of Hardees, been absorbed by another entity (Carl's Jr.).
Here is my main problem with McDonald's: The way they cook the food. I blame the dumbass who made the film "Super Size It" about 10 years ago. This minor intellectual determined that if you eat McD's food every day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner you will...wait for it...get fat.
Umm...yeah, okay. If you smoke too much you will get lung cancer and if you jump out in front of a bus you'll get run over. A well placed "Captain Obvious" statement is appropriate here, but this is a classy blog and I won't go there as tempting as it might be.
I firmly believe that jackasses like Mr. Spurlock there, (the guy with the fires stuffed in his word hole), have the internationally successful McDonald's so spooked that they have decided to lower the quality of the product to keep the health nuts from picketing their establishment's worldwide. The fact that they no longer fry the burgers. The press them, set them in a warmer bin, then nuke them for a bit to get them hot and melt the cheese after you order a Quarter Pounder or a Big Mac.
I guess I'm the only one on the planet who remembers walking into McDonald's and hearing the hiss of burgers being cooked on a griddle. It was distinctive and divine. If the corporate monster reads this blog they will no doubt argue that the worlds best selling burger is pressed not because of the health nut gestapo but because it get's the burger to you that much faster and that it tastes the same as it always did.
Well, I'm not buying it.
Now I know the health conscious among my readers are scoffing at my romantic look into a hunk of meat sitting in it's own grease but I'm sorry, a burger cooked in the 1970s at McD tasted a lot different than it does now, as do the french fries, which were once cooked not in the neutrally flavored canola oil they are now, but animal fat.
Sure, it plugs your arteries. Sure it sends you cholesterol count and blood glucose numbers into orbit, and yes Morgan Spurlock, it will make you fat...but it was TASTY. What blows my mind in this whole thing is that when it comes down to fast food...which is never EVER meant to be a source of regular sustenance...thanks to the shock troops of healthy living we are forced to sacrifice taste for keep ourselves alive that extra hour on the day we meet our maker. Sure, this rant is motivated a bit on the fact that things aren't what they were when I was a kid, but how hard would it be for us to maybe use McDonald's for a reward say for losing weight once in a while.
My mother did to great success during her dieting when I was a kid. No joke. Weigh-in day was Thursday and when she lost weight, all of us would pile into the truckster and go to McDonald's to celebrate. It was awesome. There wss a lesson there, and it's one we as a nation should hold as a example. If you work hard and show self-discipline, you get rewards, however small.
Nah, that would involve work and self discipline, and as Americans, we just don't do that real well.
McDonald's cooks their burgers the same way they have for over 20 years. They fry them, put them in a warmer, take them out, make the burger, heat it up, put it in the heating bin where it sits for up to 20 minutes. Maybe it's not the same as the '70s but it's the same for the past 20+ years. You're just now catching up?
ReplyDeleteI have no idea what you mean by 'pressed'. It comes in a frozen patty and it's put on the grill.
Also, why are you eating at McDonald's anyway? Why are you eating fast food AT ALL!? It is the absolute worst thing you could be eating.
I had a friend at Avalon who was at one time a manager at McD and he described a burger press as something like a Foreman Grill, only with no grooves to slough away grease. Like one of those pressing machines at a dry cleaner.They toss the burger puck onto the hot plates, squeeze, and it's a Quarter Pounder.
ReplyDeleteNo, it's not part of my regular diet. I avoid it with a deliberate passion. The whole blog entry originated from the need to feed the boy "on the fly" so to speak, and when you ask a 12-year-old where he wants to eat before you return him to mom, you get McDonalds.
Not smart, I know, but I was a little pressed for time.