Fast food is not real food. I understand why people are confused about this fact, since it strongly resembles real food. A fast food hamburger seemingly has many elements of a real food hamburger: bunlike slabs, cooked meatish product, and vegetable-reminiscent items.
It is prepared on an item that is strongly similar to a stove, by people who receive some of the same training as a chef. But in the end, fast food and real food must part company.
Consider a fast food burger patty. Comprised of various sorts of beef depending on which establishment you patronize, it is unvaryingly at a long remove from an actual cow. Ordinarily, a cow would be slaughtered, cleaned, butchered, and then one would select the beef from a more local butcher who has ground it for you.
With a fast food burger, however, the meat has the additional trip otothe company meat processing facility, where it is ground up in a manner designed to disguise poor quality or flaws, made into patties by workers or a machine, and then transported varying distances to the restaurant. The end results are patties that are as uniform as possible – uniformly bad, unfortunately.
Or the bun. I am sure that in Bizarro world, where all the men wear goatees and all the women are straight, a fast food bun is some sort of bread. But in our world, those glutinous lumps of rocky tar have a marked tendency towards staleness and tastelessness. In fact, if they have a taste, it is most often closer to chalk than it is to a baked bun. Bite into it, and feel it crumble into unpleasant chunks. Or perhaps you will get a squishy one instead, so chewy you look for the Bazooka Joe comic under the pickle.
Along with the “meat” and “bun”, there comes a piece of lettuce (sometimes rendered into shreds to better disguise it), two pickle slices (fat, flat, and tasting more of vinegar than anything really like a pickle), and a slice of tomato (which is usually unoffensive, to be honest).
And the sauces! Don’t forget the sauces! Generally a variation on the ketchup, mustard, or barbecue theme, the sauce is what sets apart a regular fast food burger from an unusually awful one. Only a cloying blast of rancid western sauce could make this travesty of a meal worse.
Optionally, you might select bacon on your sandwich. This is just in case you like knotted, fried cardboard. Surprisingly, many do. Or you can get cheese- or rather a sticky slab of melted offal, so far removed from a dairy product that it has journeyed into the upper stratosphere of offensively unhealthy foods. In space, no one can hear your arteries scream.
To accompany this culinary assault, you are generally given fries. Chunks of potato prepared long ago, flash-fried in reused grease, covered in salt to hide the bitterness of old oil and to complement the hydrolization, and served up to you in a nice cardboard sleeve. Pick one up and eat it, then wipe your fingers on your napkin. See those dark grease spots appearing? You are shoving handfuls of that slick cholesterol into your mouth. Recall Dr. Nick and rub your fries on a piece of paper: if the paper turns clear, it’s your window to weight-gain!
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying this sort of stuff isn’t delicious. A greasy hamburger, glistening with congealing fats and swollen with the detritus of the hundred burgers that came before it is just the kind of thing that hits the spot if you are sick of real food. Sink your teeth into the fleshy pulp of the bun and delight in the warm, gooey center of beef-esque item.
But what are you really gaining? If you buy some real food and prepare it, it will take you the same amount of time as driving to a fast food place. It isn’t really much effort. Your reward will be a fresh meal that is worthy of being consumed by a person, rather than a grungy bit of muck. You deserve that. Everyone but objectivists deserves that. So don’t you think it’s time you treated yourself to what you deserve?
In the interest of full disclosure, I probably should admit that I have written this column with the intention of disgusting myself so fully with fast food that I will not be tempted. Anyone can fall prey to the siren call of quick and easy fattening food, and I am no exception. But after writing (or now reading) so much about the stinking fats and unpleasant nature of fast food, maybe you and I will both reach for an apple instead. Just don’t let a fast food place get a hold of it, unless you want it two weeks later and deep-fried.