McDonalds
There’s this McDonalds near Kirkwood Highway that I’ll eat in alone sometimes, because it’s easier than texting people “McDonalds at 6?” and dealing with responses like “no” and “how about we dine somewhere that’s not contributing to the clogging of American’s arteries one processed cheeseburger at a time, look at me, I am a college student who enjoys multigrain snack bars and will outlive all the culinarily unrefined yokels with Heinz ketchup eternally smeared on their upper lips.” I have something of a six-year-old’s attitude towards McDonalds, in part because I have only been contributing to their “_,___,___,___ served” signs for about six years now—I was raised in a strictly kosher household, with two dishwashers and two separate sets of cutlery and absolutely no tolerance for the improperly maimed meat served nightly on our neighbors’ tables. It wasn’t unitl I was fifteen that I learned that consuming McNuggets wouldn’t cause my dignified Jewish organs to implode, and to this day I get a subversive kick out of eating fast food. That was my great teenage rebellion: Buying a quarter pound hamburger for lunch on a sunny Tuesday afternoon. (Rock and roll, McDonalds.)
So I don’t really harbor any will towards McDonalds and its fry-slinging clown of death, the way I’m sure I would if I read ‘Fast Food Nation’ (so maybe this is ignorance on my part), the way that nearly everyone I know does—from the kids with their protein shakes strengthening abs for many more decades of ab-strengthening and proten shake consuming to the friend I’ll go on roadtrips with here and there, complaining that McDonalds owns the highways and persistently refusing my requests to stop off at the Big Mac Museum, I mean it’s practically on the way, what were you going to do with those two hours anyway, eat a gigantic apple?
And by the way that’s another arugment I take issue with—that McDonalds has blighted our serene American landscape with their many thousands of easy-to-access franchises, and many millions of accompanying PlayPlace balls. I don’t doubt that they did that, at some point; but those “McDonalds in Five Miles” signs, those mirror image McDonalds separated by desolate stretches of highway, that one table taken up by that one little league team every time you eat alone in the one near Kirkwood Highway, the one with the depressing Old Hollywood theme that forces unkind comparisons between the Marilyn Monroe poster on the wall and the homeless man eating a McDouble under her shining black and white visage: That is the American I know, and don’t really understand, but am trying to.
In half a century no one on earth will have known a world without McDonalds; it’ll just be something that’s always been here, like the constitution, or Abe Vigoda. To a kid who until age thirteen had been cloistered from nine to five in small rooms with old rabbis, eating a Big Mac wasn’t just rebellion: It was the ultimate act of assimilation. (And probably it’s worth noting that until the far-right religious revival of the 40s/50s a good deal of even Orthodox Jews didn’t keep kosher—I’m taking the same assimiliatory steps as people who are now dead, possibly from eating too much fast food.) So anyway the message here is: Fuck you if you think you’re too good for McDonalds, unless you’ve formed this opinion after inverstigating their business/labor/animal practices, in which case I commend your dedication to Truth.
