The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [57]
My eleven-year-old son, Isaac, was more than happy to join me at McDonald’s; he doesn’t get there often, so it’s a treat. (For most American children today, it is no longer such a treat: One in three of them eat fast food every single day.) Judith, my wife, was less enthusiastic. She’s careful about what she eats, and having a fast-food lunch meant giving up a “real meal,” which seemed a shame. Isaac pointed out that she could order one of McDonald’s new “premium salads” with the Paul Newman dressing. I read in the business pages that these salads are a big hit, but even if they weren’t, they’d probably stay on the menu strictly for their rhetorical usefulness. The marketers have a term for what a salad or veggie burger does for a fast-food chain: “denying the denier.” These healthier menu items hand the child who wants to eat fast food a sharp tool with which to chip away at his parents’ objections. “But Mom, you can get the salad…”
Which is exactly what Judith did: order the Cobb salad with Caesar dressing. At $3.99, it was the most expensive item on the menu. I ordered a classic cheeseburger, large fries, and a large Coke. Large turns out to be a full 32 ounces (a quart of soda!) but, thanks to the magical economics of supersizing, it cost only 30 cents more than the 16-ounce “small.” Isaac went with the new white-meat Chicken McNuggets, a double-thick vanilla shake, and a large order of fries, followed by a new dessert treat consisting of freeze-dried pellets of ice cream. That each of us ordered something different is a hallmark of the industrial food chain, which breaks the family down into its various demographics and markets separately to each one: Together we would be eating alone together, and therefore probably eating more. The total for the three of us came to fourteen dollars, and was packed up and ready to go in four minutes. Before I left the register I picked up a densely printed handout called “A Full Serving of Nutrition Facts: Choose the Best Meal for You.”
We could have slipped into a booth, but it was such a nice day we decided to put the top down on the convertible and eat our lunch in the car, something the food and the car have both been engineered to accommodate. These days 19 percent of American meals are eaten in the car. The car has cup holders, front seat and rear, and, except for the salad, all the food (which we could have ordered, paid for, and picked up without opening the car door) can be readily eaten with one hand. Indeed, this is the genius of the chicken nugget: It liberated chicken from the fork and plate, making it as convenient, waste-free, and automobile-friendly as the precondimented hamburger. No doubt the food scientists at McDonald’s corporate headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois, are right now hard at work on the one-handed salad.
But though Judith’s Cobb salad did present a challenge to front-seat dining, eating it at fifty-five miles per hour seemed like the thing to do, since corn was the theme of this meal: The car was eating corn too, being fueled in part by ethanol. Even though the additive promises to diminish air quality in California, new federal mandates pushed by the corn processors require refineries in the state to help eat the corn surplus by diluting their gasoline with 10 percent ethanol.
I ate a lot of McDonald’s as a kid. This was in the pre-Wallerstein era, when you still had to order a second little burger or sack of fries if you wanted more, and the chicken nugget had not yet been invented. (One memorable childhood McDonald’s meal ended when our station wagon got rear-ended at a light, propelling my milk shake across the car in creamy white lariats.) I loved everything about fast food: the individual portions all wrapped up like presents (not having to share with my three sisters was a big part of the appeal; fast food was private property at its best); the familiar meaty perfume of