What's a Grimace anyway?

Don’t know about you but I can definitely get behind this new healthy image that McDonald’s is trying to project. If I am forced to eat salads and refrain from ultra-sizing my value meal in order to have a rather smoking hot interpretation of Ronald McDonald as the new corporate mascot I will gladly oblige. Much better than a rather untrustworthy clown.

In jPod, Douglas Coupland proposes the following situation. He has programmers create a game in which Ronald McDonald is basically this violent monster who reeks havoc on this fantasy kingdom and it is up to the player to try to defeat him. Ronald of course gets the best lines like “Taste the scorched fruit inside my pies” and “Die, you seedy little elves who refuse to accept any new menu items added after 1975” and the ultimate “You shall wander the wastelands in search of fishwiches fallen from the sky, frozen and plump with weevils and sauce of the fiercest tartar.”

(Somehow I now feel that my blog will prevent me from ever getting a job in OakBrook. Oh well.)

Actually, my blog is probably the least that the fast food companies need to worry about. I am very interested in the screen adaptation of “Fast Food Nation” by Richard Linklatter. First, I want to see how the director of Slacker, Dazed and Confused and Before Sunset decides to interpret a non-fiction book about working and sanitary conditions within the fast food industry. I’m not sure how you go from Matthew McConaghuey going “The best thing about high school girls is that I get older and they stay the same age” to “Tired illegal immigrants having serious injuries on the night shift at meat packing plants.” Got to admit that Richard doesn’t take the easy path on projects.

But I’m more interested in whether or not this is the movie that really starts waking people up to what precisely we are eating. “Super Size Me” did to a point but at some level you realized that it was basically a huge setup. Eat only one thing of anything for a month and you would be the worse for wear. But “Fast Food Nation” is based off of an incredible book by Eric Schlosser in which he goes into great detail on all aspects of the fast food industry. From the way franchise agreements work in order to put the hurt on the franchisee to the engineering of the food to a well, better understanding of how your food gets to you. It’s fascinating and disturbing at the same time. You read about how there are chemists who create scents that mimic French fries or hamburgers and how they add those to the food and the science geek in me goes “Awesome” while the neglected part of my brain in charge of my overall health goes “Are you sure that eating something like that is a good idea?”

It’s been interesting that since I’ve started to try to lose weight and actually focused on what I was eating you determine just how many junk calories are in your daily intake. I used to drink Gatorade a lot on the basis that it was healthy. I mean, it’s for athletes. It also meant that I was downing 200 calories after working out for 300 calories, which isn’t much of a net benefit. Or the fact that a Tombstone cheese pizza is two servings while a pepperoni pizza, which is the exact same size, is three servings and therefore the same amount of calories per serving. You can have lots of fun with math when you work at it.

I’m not recommending becoming vegan and lord knows I still have my store of Twinkies in case of disaster but it’s been nice getting away from fast food for a while. Even if it means that I might wreck the business model behind Ronette McDonald.