McDonald’s Big Mac more memories than meal By: Alison Gillmor Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Thursday, Aug. 2, 2018

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/08/2018 (2242 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I’m going to write an affectionate ode to the Big Mac, which turned 50 this week. And before you start sending me emails, I know it’s not a good hamburger. Not good for the planet, not good for me, not good, period.

With the Big Mac, that’s not really the point.

If I want a good hamburger, I’ll get a Golden Boy at Nuburger, with truffle aioli and a Shiraz reduction. Or a Winnipeg-style Fat Boy, dripping with chili sauce and packed with sour pickles. Or one made in my own kitchen, grilled on a charcoal barbecue and topped with old cheddar and caramelized onions.

When I eat a Big Mac, it’s not the taste of hamburger I’m looking for, but the memory of childhood.

Considered purely as a member of the burger family, the Big Mac can’t compete. It shouldn’t even be compared with its robust and beefy cousins.

As a foodstuff, the Big Mac is in its very own category.

That’s the way with certain mass-produced foods.

Kraft Dinner, for instance, is not a poor replica of homemade macaroni and cheese. It is its own thing — weird, orange and chemically made to fill that KD-shaped craving that sometimes hits.

Most people have something like this — a convenience-store classic or fast-food favourite that functions like a cut-rate version of Proust’s madeleine, calling up kids’ birthday parties, teenagers’ late-night snacks, students’ cheap and cheerful suppers.

I still remember when going to McDonald’s was a rare treat. This was long before the Golden Arches were a ubiquitous feature on every urban strip from Grande Prairie to Guangzhou.

I grew up viewing Grimace and the Hamburglar as normal — well, not normal, exactly, but familiar — whereas in hindsight they are clearly the stuff of psychedelic nightmares.

I can sing the Big Mac jingle (“Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onion on a sesame-seed bun”).

I can call up the Pembina Highway billboards that pictured the Big Mac as a majestic mountain of double patties, triple buns, the layers of condiments distinct and brightly coloured — though you knew from experience that when you opened the carton, your own Big Mac wouldn’t look like that. All the ingredients would be there, per that earworm jingle, but they would be much, much flatter.

Even that inevitable letdown was part of the Big Mac’s odd appeal.

The comforting sameness of the Big Mac embodies the promise of modern, standardized fast food — that it will be the unchanging, wherever and whenever you happen to be.

In terms of snob appeal, this can’t compete with gustatory recollections that rely on uniqueness, on rareness — the incredible fish soup at that little family-run place in southern France, the tacos campechanos at that hole-in-the-wall taqueria in Mexico City.

But when I do go to McD’s, I want the OG experience. I want a Big Mac and fries. I don’t hold with those recent nouveau options, those healthier, fresher, more 21st-century possibilities.

But it’s hard to completely discount food memories that are rooted in the more prosaic quality of sameness, that follow the line of predictability that connects the Big Mac you eat today directly to the one you ate 20 years ago, or 30 years ago, or now, even 50 years ago. The taste is always the same.

And what exactly is that taste? A sign that the Big Mac isn’t a real hamburger is the sheer irrelevance of the beef patties, which I don’t think I could even isolate out as a separate flavour entity. Basically, they are subsumed into the larger, holistic Big Mac experience, which is soft, squishy and special-saucy.

I don’t go to McDonald’s very often, maybe once or twice a year. I’ve seen Super Size Me. I’ve gotten the Morgan Spurlock lowdown on the vast amounts of salt and fat and sugar in the Big Mac Meal.

But when I do go to McD’s, I want the OG experience. I want a Big Mac and fries. I don’t hold with those recent nouveau options, those healthier, fresher, more 21st-century possibilities. The kale in the salad, the barista-style coffee, the dine-in venues with fireplaces. Heck, even the McRib seems like an outlandish novelty item to me.

Just give me a Big Mac, please. “A meal disguised as a sandwich,” as the old advertising slogan declared. Or maybe memories dressed up as a burger.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca