W6: (Not-so) Secret Recipes

As my previous blog posts may or may not have revealed, my brother and I worked together, on and off, at Steak and Shake. We typically didn’t see much of each other thanks to my brother’s heartless monopoly on the higher-paying night shifts, but on the odd occasion that we did share a shift, we typically treated it as an informal cooking competition.

In recent years, Steak and Shake’s menu has become a gargantuan clusterfuck of variety and decadence outdone only by, let’s say, Ben and Jerry’s—I’m only exaggerating of course, but we did serve quite a lot of Guacamole and Bacon Chipotle Steakburgers. Thanks to the combination of our restaurant’s wide stock of ingredients and the inevitable periods of customer-less boredom that comes with being open 24 hours, my brother and I were able to refine our culinary expertise during our stay. After all, the only places you can go after creating something as exquisite as a hotdog topped with French fries, chili and guacamole are either soaring new heights, or the restroom.

For the most part, we kept our experiments secret until we felt they had been perfected; few recipes managed to pass by our watchful taste buds and escape until the classless palates of our contemporaries. My brother had a number prejudices I had difficulties abiding—a hatred of nacho cheese or “chewy” wilted spinach on hamburgers, for instance. I myself have always loathed the use of Fritos on hamburgers and hot dogs. There’s something about the way the Fritos get ground up between my teeth and somehow manage to always feel stale that bothers me. Their god-awful taste bothers me sometimes as well.

The would, of course, be my one of the many fatal flaws in the tragedy that is my life. Earlier this year Steak and Shake unveiled its newest burger: the chili and cheese steakburger, a variation of the traditional double steakburger with Fritos, jalapeños, chili and cheese, and onions. It was pitched to the chain’s executives by the manager of the Steak and Shake in Pickerington. I knew the guy; I had covered night shifts for him several times and—chalk it up to fate or an elaborate, malicious cosmic alignment—the man was an utter jackass. He was exactly the kind of guy that would put Fritos on a hamburger.

And me? I treaded so closely to greatness, preparing to leap off the precipice of mediocrity, but backed off at the last moment. I may never be whole again

.

Look upon your God, Babylon.

W5: Bluh

My grandmother remembers the early days of fast food with fondness. She used to bring her (vast and horrifying) family to White Castle—then something of a respectable restaurant—to feed the whole family a decent, cheap meal. At that time, fast food was a novelty item enjoyed only on occasion.  The image she paints for me, though tinged with nostalgia, fits in line with the American 50s: families, blessed with an economic soaring skyward with reckless abandon and disposable income, appreciated fast dining as a luxury. I can’t help but wonder how she might feel after downing a slider today. Would the tiny hamburger contain vestigial flavors of a time when food was meant to be inhaled, and not sold?

The sea change of fast food in the United States from a pseudo-luxury item to a sloppy, thoughtless meal could be marketed as a capitalist love story.  As the industry grew, competition and demand increased. In true corporate fashion, food chains confronted the dropping salaries of working families over the years by presenting them with a cheaper corner-cutting product made by increasingly unskilled hands. The quaintness of the diner and drive-in fast food restaurant evaporated into the air above the new fast food model, which provided us with affordable slop injected into our arteries within seconds. Viewers of this phenomenon might see this as a romantic, truly American boon meant to be enjoyed by all members of the economic spectrum, or, alternatively, as a metaphorical stomp on the stomachs of Americans with a golden boot. Granted, the former perspective would require the viewer to already have a fondness for the ever-growing wage gap of the United States.

Of course, thanks to the extreme nature of this wage gap’s expansion, the notion that the fast food industry still panders to the lower class is nonsense. Anyone who has genuine experience with dire financial straits—not including the “I’m just a poor college student eating ramen” crowd—is well aware that fast food is hardly a viable option for feeding a working class family compared to cooking your own meals. Perhaps that’s the most American thing about fast food: like so much of our culture’s regrettable elements, it is propelled by an increasingly unaware, self-defeating middle class.

W4: Super Size Me review

In Super Size Me, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock undergoes a month-long experiment, in which he is required to eat three meals at McDonalds a day and to abstain from exercise, on-foot commuting and alternative sources of nutrition. Through documentation of this experiment, as well as interviews from industry insiders and research regarding rising rates of obesity in the United States, Spurlock hopes to call attention to the powerful role that fast food companies, particularly McDonald’s, have played in “supersizing” Americans. I believe that the film is effective as an awareness-raising feature length PSA, but fails as a serious critical look at the fast food industry, thanks to its absurd and largely irrelevant central experiment, as well as its flawed methodology.

From the get-go, the film’s focus on Spurlock’s experiment feels like a frivolous charade. The specifics of the project—three meals from McDonald’s a day, roughly 5000 calories per day, no exercise, etc.—are reflective only of a mythical American super-slob; the lone element of the experiment representative of the statistically-determined “average American” is the number of steps taken by Spurlock per day. While it could serve as a glimpse at the short-term effects of exaggerated overeating, the experiment says little about the reality of improper eating—it is a bastardized, mainstream variation of what a serious long-term study of the effects of eating fast food might look like, without any of the tedious credibility and relevance. Of course, it’s still a wildly amusing premise; Spurlock’s sense of humor carries throughout the experiment, interrupted only by occasional segments of vomit-inducing soap opera exchanges between Spurlock and his girlfriend.

The segments of Super Size Me unrelated to Spurlock’s experiment, however, are on point. Spurlock’s scrutiny of the fast food industry’s despicable strategies for marketing to children is particularly memorable. In one scene, several children are unable to recognize both George Washington and Jesus Christ, but are instantly familiar with Ronald McDonald—the power of this scene extends far beyond the power of marketing and makes an almost poetic statement on the whole of post-modernity. The wide variety of sources interviewed in the film—from silver-tongued lobbyists and medical professionals to cafeteria workers and schoolchildren—allows the film to focus in on the multi-faceted nature of America’s obesity problem. These interviews are both enlightening and provocative. There is a noticeable sting to one lunch lady’s admittance that she rarely does more than reheat food for schoolchildren on a daily basis.

Sadly, Spurlock’s interviews of “ordinary people” on the street are thuggish at best; We see continuous talking head commentary from the same six or seven interviewees, all of whom happen to be either blithely (and conveniently) unaware or—and who would have expected this—members of the lower class. As viewers, we are implored to suspend our disbelief that while in New York City, the filmmaker was unable to find one interview subject on the street that did not fall under his pre-established “average American” label—represented, apparently, by obese people already standing outside of a McDonalds or the uneducated poor.

That being said, I still enjoyed Super Size Me. It was funny, informative, and occasionally provocative. While I question a number of Spurlock’s techniques and choices, I believe any attempt to raise awareness on pressing cultural issues such as this, powered by hyperbole or otherwise, is admirable.