Cooking With Dexter Happy-Meal Me By PETE WELLS The New York Times October 4, 2009
At 5, Dexter has reached the age when schoolyard friends tell him things his parents have kept from him. "Luke says there's a restaurant called McDonald's," he reported one day. There was no point denying it, so I asked him what else he learned. "He says that other kids eat there, but we don't. And he says that the food is bad for you." It seemed as if Luke's nutritional views might enable us to keep Dexter away from the golden arches indefinitely, but a few months later he brought it up again. This time he wanted to try it. Many, maybe even most, Americans have relationships with McDonald's that are at least as complex and rich as the ones we have with other people. Years ago a cheeseburger, fries and hot apple pie meant that I'd been a good boy, that my mother loved me. Later, chicken McNuggets provided the quick dinner break that helped me struggle through a summer job in telephone sales for which I was spectacularly ill suited. In the past two decades the chain has been little more for me than a source of palatable coffee on the Interstates, but going there always triggers a rumble of old emotions. And now, as I knew it would, fatherhood has changed my relationship with McDonald's again. In the meantime, the country's attitude toward the chain has grown more fraught: among some people, it has become a symbol of everything wrong with the way we eat. Of course, French fries and sodas were already called junk food when I was a boy, but no teenagers had yet tried to sue McDonald's for making them fat, and no filmmaker had documented the decline in his health during a month of eating every meal there. For some well-meaning parents, McDonald's is anathema. They would no sooner take the family out for Happy Meals than they would let their kids follow the meal with a postprandial cigarette. My convictions aren't quite that strong, but Dexter's friend pretty much got it right: Other kids eat there. Mine don't. For one thing, there are roughly a thousand restaurants in New York City that are more interesting. Because we have so many alternatives (and also, I suspect, because we watch very little television), McDonald's hasn't had much opportunity to seize Dexter's young imagination. But seize it will, and seize it did. When my wife, Susan, was out of town, Dexter and I walked the two blocks to our neighborhood McDonald's with his younger brother, Elliot, in the stroller. I ordered the newish Angus Third Pounder and enjoyed it reasonably well. The boys had Happy Meals with McNuggets, fries and milk. For dessert, I bought two apple pies. Dexter immediately asked why he saw the yellow McDonald's M everywhere. How do you explain one of the world's most sophisticated marketing machines to a 5-year-old? Nor did I have a ready answer for his next question: "What's in the food that makes it bad for you?" The milk was fortified with vitamins A and D and contained 1 percent fat. No harm there. With the fries and McNuggets, we enter the polysyllabic realm of ingredients I don't keep in my kitchen: mono- and diglycerides, tertiary butylhydroquinone, a number of phosphates, dimethylpolysiloxane. The last one is used as a lubricant, a dry-cleaning solution, an aquarium sealant, a component of the tiles that let spacecraft plunge through the atmosphere without burning up, a treatment for head lice and the thing that makes Silly Putty elastic. McDonald's adds it to cooking oil to avoid foaming. I can't find any convincing evidence that it is bad for you. ... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/magazine/04food-t-000.html *********************************** * POST TO MEDIANEWS@ETSKYWARN.NET * *********************************** Medianews mailing list Medianews@etskywarn.net http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
