Super-size Me

For my mother, widowed at 25 with three babies to feed, fast-food must have seemed like manna from heaven. The first McDonalds “restaurant” opened two years before I was born, about 300 miles from where I grew up in suburban St. Louis, Mo. Our dining room was the back seat of a 60s-era Beetle, and I, being the oldest, would dole out the tiny bags of fries to my brothers. (This was way before “medium,” much less “super-size,” were menu options.) By the time I was in grade school, the Colonel had opened a Kentucky Fried Chicken nearby our house. I lived for the evenings Mom would come home from work, and I would see her unload from her battered bug a bucket of artery-clogging breasts and legs flavored with those secret 11 special herbs and spices.

Fast-food dinners were not so common then as they are in our culture today. Fast-food was still a small luxury, and, in some circles, thought of as a less-than-adequate substitute for the home-cooked meals 1950s homemakers were expected to provide for their families. So I remember those occasions as being a little exciting, a little decadent and always festive. Each of those meals was a sugar-induced spiritual high, a salty sacrament of the joy of being alive.

Now before you get the wrong idea, let me clarify that the only McDonalds I’ll patronize these days are in foreign countries, and then only if I need to use the bathroom. Say whatever you like about the cholesterol content of their fries, you can always count on Mickey Dee’s for clean toilets. It is not the food itself I’m nostalgic for. It is the event of the feast itself. Rosalind Russell once said, “Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving.” This Web site is a journal of what I do to keep from starving. Eating and drinking is an art, even if it is eating and drinking a Quarter Pounder and a Coke.

Well, maybe that’s not true for anyone over the age of, say 12, but you get the idea. What distinguishes dining from feeding-at-the-trough is symbol, ritual, fellowship and simply the intent to be human and humane. So I am firmly resolved to follow the advice of Orson Well’s doctor who told him to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless he invited three other people. Consider yourself invited.