I've been doing a lot. My to-do list has been about 400 items long and I've had more than 20 pages of writing and a billion pages of reading. This is a sample of what I've had to write. Agh.
The Missing Link between Clowns and Amazonian Poison Dart Frogs:
A scientific theory guess by John Lowther
As a child, I was always terrified of going through the drive-thru at McDonald's. Sure, I got a Toy Story tic-tac-toe board in my Happy Meal, but that was never enough to help me get over my fear of the giant Hamburglar and Grimace statues next to the pickup window. I remember the statues having devilish expressions on their faces and eyes that seemed to follow me as my mother pulled our ugly blue minivan through to the exit. As if that wasn't enough to scare the living hell out of a kid, both statues leaned forward and, even as a child, I instinctively questioned their structural integrity—making each trip to the fast food chain seem to be a game of Russian Roulette, but with toppling statues in the place of a revolver.
What my mother and I didn't realize at that time was that taking frequent trips to McDonald's was, in fact, a more dangerous endeavor than either of us—a mother with no time to cook food for her family and a boy who ate the food his mother gave him—could have imagined. Then again, well over 90 percent of the time we frequented fast food restaurants occurred before the new millennium, when journalists such as Eric Schlosser and Supersize Me's Morgan Spurlock helped to make the unhealthy nature of fast food more mainstream, common knowledge.
I was a freshman in high school when my father rented Supersize Me. Before watching that movie, I had never been conscious about my weight. I watched Morgan Spurlock go through a month of eating nothing but McDonald's food and deal with the consequences that came with it—a month of health-related issues, depression, and fights with his girlfriend (rightfully so, too. She was a vegan and McDonald's is hardly her idea of an ideal diet). I was frightened by the drastic change in both his health and his psyche caused by the food he ate.
I immediately took into account what I was putting into my body. I decided that it would be best to cut fast food out of my diet and become a vegetarian... again (to be fair, though, the first few times I tried vegetarianism I was five years old and my mother told me that hot dogs weren't meat, so I ate those). However, one of Schlosser's points made me question whether or not I've been successful at being a vegetarian since I wised up to what is and is not meat. Schlosser lets his audience know that we're not always aware of what we're putting into our bodies, in fact, for the longest time, I'd been ingesting “Cochineal extract (also known as carmine or carminic acid)... made from the desiccated bodies of female Dactylopius coccus Costa, a small insect harvested mainly in Peru and the Canary Islands... Dannon strawberry yogurt gets its color from carmine, and so do many frozen fruit bars, candies, and fruit fillings, and Ocean Spray pink-grapefruit juice drink.” I've been eating yogurt, popsicles, candy and pie filling for a while now, but I had no idea that these living things (70,000 of whom, according to Schlosser, are needed to make only a pound of carmine) were used in a lot of the foods I ate.
I wasn't sure what to make of this revelation. I was trying to pursue a healthier lifestyle by avoiding fast food and being a vegetarian, and I come to find out that I've been eating crushed up bug carcases since I was a youngun eating Danimals yogurt from my lunchbox. Knowing that there may be bugs in the foods I eat discourages me from continuing to be a vegetarian... Or just encourages me to tell people that I'm a vegetarian, but I eat bugs every now and again.
As a bug eating vegetarian, though, I still have to decide which fast food chain restaurants are legit places to eat. For example, I'd have to avoid “burger joints” (McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, White Castle, Jack-in-the-Box etc...) and go to places that are more accommodating to my dietary restrictions (Subway and Tim Horton's are the only two that come to mind). These slim choices as to where I can go for fast food have helped me to avoid fast food for the most part.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that eating healthy has become kind of an involuntary and habitual thing for me—it's habitual in the sense that I can't go to McDonald's because they have terrible selection for a vegetarian, and I don't eat meat mostly out of habit now. It's more involuntary in the sense that I'm a poor college student and I can't afford to eat out... ever. Anyway, on the rare occasion that I do have money, I try to have the good sense to spend it on something that I can reuse rather than consume one time.
Since that's the case, fast food and I have an estranged relationship. We used to see each other a lot, when I was a child, but now I'm rarely (if ever) around it. I can't even get a job flipping burgers at a fast food restaurant.
When I was a high school student, I was looking for a job and I applied everywhere in my hometown. On one stretch of road, we had a Tim Horton's, McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King, three Subways, and Pizza Hut, and they each got (at least) one application from me. I don't think it helped my case, though, when I informed Laura, the McDonald's manager on duty, that McDonald's was my last resort for a job and I was desperate enough to try working there. Scratch that. I know that's why I didn't get the job (because I have friends who work at McDonald's and they told me Laura didn't like my attitude)—she said, disdainfully, that I didn't have what it took to be on the McDonald's crew. She said that it takes a special kind of person to be a “team member.”
The thing with that is, I'm really okay with not being cut out to peddle burgers and fries to irritable customers, which is why I was pleased to have gotten a job in a fancy restaurant (which was a perfect job, comparatively, for someone as snobby as I am). We got all the same irritable customers, but they expected a long wait for their food, so our complaints were about whether or not a steak was rare enough rather than whether or not customers had to sit at the drive-thru window for more than thirty seconds. That, and my workplace gave me 100% discounts on foods like stuffed eggplant and manicotti rather than double cheeseburgers and grilled chicken combos, which was also nice because stuffed eggplant and manicotti aren't meat, and if I'm going to get a free meal, I'd prefer for it to be a meal I can eat regardless of my vegetarianism.
A lot of my friends worked at McDonald's, though, and I had the dubious privilege of working there vicariously though their anecdotes and complaints. I had friends who went through horror stories at the drive-thru with migrant workers who spoke nothing but hasty Spanish into speaker-box. I've heard about a few people being yelled at for not maintaining a professional demeanor. The McEmployees have had complaints of far too much McDrama taking place among coworkers over McBoyfriends McCheating on them with McSlutbags (and, more times than not, would refer to things with the prefix “Mc” to let their audience know that their woes were McDonald's-based). A few of my friends told me that the managers rank the employees based on how attractive they are and only put the prettiest employees in positions where they'd be visible to the public. Finally, and I'm not sure if this is partially a result of being shut away at the grill for being “unattractive,” fry cooks would spit in food going to particularly unruly, unfriendly customers.
I found a lot of these things hard to believe, but that's because I worked in a completely different environment. We'd never encountered customers in my time at the Fireside Manor who couldn't communicate in English. The employees at Fireside Manor knew when to turn on their professional demeanor and when to go into the kitchen and drop a couple hundred “f-bombs” about “that greasy woman with the mullet and the bedazzled Disney sweatshirt.” The employees at Fireside at least made a minor attempt at keeping dramatics out of their work environment (although sometimes, it's inevitable). We weren't ranked (openly) as to how attractive the managers found us to be, and the kitchen staff just said, “shit. Fuck,” every time a customer demanded their steak be redone or was fussy about their food.
Regardless of those few minor hangups of my job, I really enjoyed working for my boss—she was a marvelous woman. However, if my friends' stories were true, I found myself disliking McDonald's more than I did when I just knew that it sold unhealthy food. The chain advertises itself as a great place for high school kids to work due to their “flexible hours” and “friendly staff,” but, from what I had heard, the hours were as flexible as a pretzel rod and the staff was hardly friendly. It became a source of angst for my friends in addition to an anti-health establishment.
More and more, I find things I dislike about this establishment and the way it's run. Schlosser writes about his experience in the building in which smells and tastes are generated for corporations such as McDonald's. He was sniffing strips of white paper with artificial scents on them provided by a “flavorist” (a scientist who creates flavors), and notes “After closing my eyes, I suddenly smelled a grilled hamburger. The aroma was uncanny, almost miraculous -- as if someone in the room were flipping burgers on a hot grill. But when I opened my eyes, I saw just a narrow strip of white paper and a flavorist with a grin.”
Schlosser's writing helps to echo the disillusionment with fast food that I've experienced throughout my life through both my own instinct and my friends' discontentment working at fast food chains. Consumers and teenagers in need of employment are tricked into believing things about McDonald's food and job opportunities just as Schlosser was duped into thinking, for a second, that a white piece of paper held all the memories of his neighborhood backyard barbecues.
Ronald McDonald, McDonald's friendly mascot, is the perfect example of such disillusionment. He and his friends, the Hamburglar and Grimace, are all portrayed as brightly colored and friendly. They help to advertise food that, if eaten on a consistent basis, could kill the demographic to whom they appeal. I'm not saying childhood obesity should be blamed on clowns and amorphous purple blobs, but they're not exactly sending Ronald McDonald on national ad campaigns for vegetables or soymilk over McDonald's fast food.
It's not to say their ad campaign appeals to all children (take me, for example), but the point remains that they've attempted to market and sell their food as bright, happy, friendly and endorsed by kids' favorite cartoon character rather than as something kids may want to eat less. Not all children have the natural instinct to sense danger at the drive-thru.
For this reason, it may be best to start teaching children biology classes earlier on in their lives than in seventh and eighth grade—maybe closer to their days in Kindergarten (it could even be in place of their nap-time). I mean, not just for the useful lessons about daily caloric intake and respiration. I think kids should learn that in nature, things that are brightly colored are warning potential predators that they're poisonous. That way, when the general public sees Ronald and his friends, they may react to the characters and the products they peddle the right way—run.
