“If you know someone who goes to McDonald’s, next time they go tell them to get a burger and scrape everything off of it. Throw away the bread, scrape off the cheese, get rid of the lettuce, the ketchup, the dehydrated onions, till you’re just left with that beef patty all by itself. And take a nice big bite of that and tell me what it tastes like. Because I’m not really sure it tastes like meat… to me it tastes more like a meat-flavoured chewable.”
If anyone’s qualified to run taste tests on fast food, it’s Morgan Spurlock. In his hit documentary, Super Size Me, the 32-year old filmmaker subjects himself to a month-long, McDonald’s-only diet, Super Size portions mandatory if offered. The weight gain was expected, the depression wasn’t. “I was amazed at how bad I felt all the time on this food,” he recalls. “I would eat it and feel great. Then an hour later I would hit the wall and just crash and be moody, angry and unhappy. I didn’t anticipate it would hit me that drastically.”
Things got worse. Never mind a decreased sex drive (“I always have to be on top,” gripes his vegan chef girlfriend, Alex, in the film), by the end the medical experts tracking Spurlock’s condition are stunned by his “liver, like pâté” and insist that he calls off the experiment. The result, though, is a vastly entertaining, Michael-Moore-with-charm polemic, which has brought unexpected success and awards from Sundance to Edinburgh. McDonald’s, though, who announced the phasing out of their Super Size portions within weeks of the film’s release – “Just a coincidence, they said,” laughs Spurlock - certainly aren’t lovin’ it.
“You think fast food, you think of the Golden Arches,” he reasons, denying a personal vendetta against the corporation. “For me they represent every fast food, every franchise, every chain.” And for all his sharp digs at McDonald’s, Spurlock has a far broader agenda. “The scariest thing was finding out what garbage we’re feeding kids in our schools,” he marvels. “Then we’re like, ‘Wow, I wonder why the kids are gaining weight, I wonder why they can’t pay attention in school?’”
Just don’t question Spurlock’s patriotism: “People say, ‘Why are you and Michael Moore making these anti-American films?’ I look at this film as being the most American thing you can do: question a problem then say, ‘We’ve got to do something about this.’”
Now the thing is, we live not far away from a cut-price frozen food shop that gets good pargains on surplus McD's stock - which is fine sometimes because they have a regular supply of those chicken breasts they put in the salads and in the wraps and the new no-crap-in-them nuggets, but once they had a supply of quarter-pounders in, so we tried them.
Frozen, they look like manhole covers, with the raised squares and everything. When they're grilled...well let's say the crud that came out of them almost filled the grillpan and put us off eating them. The bite I did have tasted of nothing much more than cardboard. Not an experience I want to have again. Since then I've stuck to the Chinese takeaway over the road from our nearest McD's and Benji's for my supply of junk/comfort food.
I'm off to find some kind of gif that says "Mc Do-not's" or something...
