Here's one of my embarrassing little secrets: I could make a meal out of McDonald's french fries, and have on more than one occasion. My second part-time job in high school (after being a theater usher, cleaning wads of chewing gum out of the sand-filled ashtrays, if you want to know how long ago it was) was at a McDonald's, the one at Jefferson and Harrison before they tore it down for the new one at Jefferson and Harrison before the city made them move to Jefferson and Fairfield to make way for the expanded Grand Wayne Center.
Part of the deal of working there was that you could have McDonald's food on your break, including all the french fries you could eat. Such an overabundance at an early age will either make you detest the food on sight or love it for the rest of your life. I fall into the latter category, possibly because getting to eat the fries was the end of a long process, every stage of which I was involved in.
I helped hump the potatoes off the trucks, in hundred-pound sacks, and chain-gang them into the basement. I peeled them and sliced them into strips. I blanched them in boiling water. (That's the secret of great fries, all you budding fry cooks -- a two-step process.) I dropped them into the sizzling oil and watched them brown. I shook them out into the preparation tray and salted them and tonged them into little paper sacks. (And before all that, I helped my parents plant potatoes, tiny little buds, in the rich soil of Kentucky and then dig them up later, fat and wondrous.) My french fry experience is, I'm sure, one of the reasons I like to cook. I feel sorry for people who only eat out or have other people make their food, who are missing the transcendent pleasure of anticipating the meal to come by savoring the complex components of its assembly.
All of that is by way of saying: May the food Nazis of the Center for Science in the Public Interest be force-fed cardboard until they explode or shut up, whichever comes first. McDonald's has acknowledged that its fries contain a third more trans fats than it previously realized, and the CSPI food nannies are just beside themselves:
Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, called the change "quite a dramatic increase."
He renewed the nonprofit health advocacy group's call for McDonald's and other fast-food chains to make healthier food — and for the Foof and Drug Administration to ban the use of partially hydrogenated oil, the source of trans fat. Trans fat is made when manufacturers add hydrogen to vegetable oil — a process called hydrogenation.
"Nutritionally it's a disastrous product," Jacobson said of the fries. "McDonald's could fry in canola oil or other liquid oil" as it does in Australia, Denmark and Israel he said.
Well, hell. Anything you eat too much of, instead of paying attention to your diet and eating it now and then, can be disastrous. I suppose the food nannies provide a valuable service by letting us know which foods to be careful about. (Food-as-a-metaphor-for-life alert!) But there are the people who eat to live and those who live to eat, and I know which ones I would rather hang out with.
The restaurant chain, to its credit, is hanging tough so far:
McDonald's has been reluctant to risk changing the taste of its iconic french fries. It pledged in September 2002 to switch to a new oil that would halve the level of harmful trans fatty acid in its fries. But it has delayed those plans, citing product quality and customer satisfaction as priorities while continuing testing.
Iconic, indeed; don't mess with the classics. I'm proud to have worked there.
