Food, Inglorious Food

I don't know if any of you are familiar with the strangely alluring and unfailingly not-worth-it culinary atrocity known as the McDonald's Big & Tasty, but a couple times a year, I find myself almost supernaturally compelled to procure and ingest one of these accursed things (with a small order of fries and six chicken McNuggets--THE INCLUSION OF SWEET AND SOUR SAUCE HERE BEING NON-F--KING-NEGOTIABLE--and an Oreo McFlurry for good measure), and every time I cave in to this unholy craving, I always end up wallowing in a deep, dark morass of Liberal self-recrimination and shame. Normally, the drive home is performed in silence, without music or open windows. You know, so I can "think about what I've done."

Why do I do this? It might well be the result of a lifetime of taste-based conditioning at the hands of Big Agribusiness, but I grew up eating home-cooked meals most of the time, so I'm inclined to doubt that. Could it be purely economic in origin? After all, in this "meal" I can get about five times as many calories for a fraction of the money I would spend at a proper restaurant. I doubt this too, because although I'm not made of money, I can afford to eat fairly well most of the time, and as I said, it's more of a werewolf-type craving than any kind of rational, cost/benefit-based decision. And the crippling guilt I feel seems to indicate that it isn't just that I flat-out don't care what I eat--to the contrary; I'm fully aware of the horrible, corporate murder-beast I'm feeding (and, I suppose, suckling) when I do this.

As near as I can tell, it's mostly due to successful marketing on McDonald's part when I was too young or stupid to know or care about the health or ethical implications of my food choices, and also to the fact that my parents would sometimes--as a treat--take me and my brother to McDonalds on the way to or from school when I was in elementary school. My parents were stridently anti-fast-food, but we would lean on them mercilessly until they gave in, and this was, after all, before the discovery of the prion. I don't blame my parents, but I do think that they were brought up in an era when less skepticism of corporate motives and ethical practices was common among people, and a cheap hamburger was really just a cheap hamburger. We live in different times now, of course; big agribusiness and other corporate and capitalist interests and processes have changed the way we eat, and the way we have to think about our food. Which is a shame, because when I have kids, I don't think I'll be able to bring my kids to McDonalds without feeling like a monster (which my parents may well have felt too, but kept hidden from us), and those little trips were really fun.

So fun, in fact, that I'm finding myself craving one of those awful frankenburgers right now. Thank goodness I've got a flat tire.