Burgers and the Bourgeois

I hate McDonald’s. I hate the cloying, salty air that bloats up against smudged windows. I hate the slick ice cream, and the insipid meat. I hate sitting in booths as red and slimy as spilled ketchup. I hate French fries and self-loathing packaged in flamboyant red stripes.

I hated it most on a Wednesday in early October when I ran out of ideas for dessert and followed my sugar craving to the pasty yellow arch. Picking listlessly at the once-rainbow candies of a McFlurry with one of those unwieldy spoons, I knew I was defeated, and I was ashamed to sit there with them.

The regulars. The McDonalds people—maids about to catch the bus, perhaps, mothers without the time or energy to cook dinner, middle schoolers not quite ready to go home, single men. I could pick them out from their bulging waistlines and unquestioning enthusiasm. They tucked in to their cheap meals with resignation, but also eagerness—knowing that life wouldn’t get any better, but excited, delighted, even addicted, to the sugar-spun bread and plastic cheese.

I didn’t belong with them. I subsist on oatmeal and almond butter, apples, quinoa, and chicken breast. I am an enlightened consumer. That child-size McFlurry only had 347 calories—I checked.

And then I started thinking. Some of the cheapest meals on the menu deliver more than half of a person’s recommended daily Calories. Disgusting? Before you shudder at the supple folds of cheese and the greasy mayo smile oozing out of that Big Mac, consider that the rest of the world’s poor aren’t getting enough to eat.

Take North Korea. On the rare occasions that middle-tier families receive shipments of rice or noodles from the government, they often boil the food and then save the noodles and drink the glutinous water. This process repeats until the noodles have completely broken down. Children in poorer nations like the DPRK, Somalia, and Bolivia have bloated tummies not from overconsumption, but from a lack of sufficient nutrients.

Only in America is surplus food considered vulgar. Only in America do the rich consider it their privilege to starve, downing kale and chia smoothies as part of the season’s new juice cleanse. They shell out thousands of dollars for the chance to shed pounds on the treadmill, splurge on coffee, and burn corn as fuel. Only in America would we commodify negative calories.

Producers of hot commodities like rice, milk, and wheat receive subsidies from the American government to drive down prices. Between 1995 and 2009, these subsidies totaled $246 billion dollars.

Congress writes this check by borrowing from itself, by borrowing from the global economy, by importing cheap products, and by outsourcing cheap labor. These funds could go towards international investment or human rights activism. Whether or not they should is open for debate, but the key point is that our subsidized food industry exists only because we have the economic clout to write massive checks against ourselves, to set the prices we want.

Some people cite the high standard of living in America, the relatively—let me stress “relatively” here because poverty is fucking awful no matter where you live—easy lives of our “lower class,” as contradictions of wealth inequality. “Our poor have it good,” they say, “and they can thank our corporations.” To some extent, they’re right. Trickle-down economics may not do enough for the lower class, but comparing our poor to the poor in other nations presents compelling evidence that it exerts an effect.

We can also look at burgers in pop culture. Our collective mentality vilifies McDonald’s, most explicitly by the popular meme splicing Ronald McDonald with The Dark Knight’s Joker.

By contrast, In-n-Out is the Internet’s darling, dishing up fast-food in style, and yeah, their burgers taste better than McDonald’s—or Wendy’s or Burger King’s—but foodies who scrub out the barbecue and grilled their own sliders aren’t particularly impressed by mass-produced, hand-cut fries.

Forgetting what in the global context constitute minor differences in taste and quality, the two arches and the two palms sell the same product, and the In-n-Out obsession highlights the hypocrisy of pop culture. We dismiss some cheap, over-processed meals as “disgusting” and “fatty” and glorify others for the same reasons because we have constructed superficial, social connotations for McDonald’s and In-N-Out.

Earl and Arlene Redneck eat Big Macs; Hollywood stars binge on “animal style” fries. Pudgy housemaids start the morning with McMuffins; sexy frat stars sober up on Number Ones.

Here’s the physical reality—both meals deliver protein, carbohydrates, fats. Both meals deliver 500-1000 calories. Breakfast at McDonald’s and dinner at In-N-Out would keep a lightly active person alive indefinitely. But we don’t see a McDonald’s burger that way; we can afford not to.

So let’s forget national politics, table today’s capitalist-socialist divisions, and examine the real meat—or the pink byproduct substitute—of the issue. America’s easy lifestyle exists because of our global economic influence. We can afford to spit on McDonald’s. Some people can’t.

I’m not preaching blue or red because politicians seeking power and ideologies tend to divide, confuse, and stifle. We can’t pass bills or wage wars to fix the problem of international inequality, but we can raise our awareness as consumers and transcend the stupor of “#firstworldproblems.” Wealth inequality exists, and you can buy it at your local McDonalds.