Mildly interesting things about boring burgers

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an intoxicated man, for lack of dinner, must be in want of a burger. Ask yourself, why are city centres peppered with ‘American Embassies?’ It’s sure as hell not because they taste good! It’s mildly edible calories, fat, and, believe it or not, just the one preservative (potassium sorbate).

McDonald’s is everywhere. When the Voyager 2 Space Probe reached the edge of our solar system and sent a transmission across the gulf of space, it signed off with ‘Do you want fries with that?’ It says something about the power of their advertising that anyone who has ever eaten one of their burgers has gone back for another one.

In fact, 69 million people eat at one of the more than 36,000 restaurants worldwide every day, that’s an average of 75 burgers every second.

So there is something to be said about how familiar Maccy D’s is, you know what you’re getting, (heart disease, indigestion and disappointment), But one man, Don Gorske of Wisconsin, keeps setting – and breaking – the Guinness World Record for the largest amount of Big Macs having eaten an average of two burgers a day, every day from age 18 in 1972.

Amazingly, despite his diet consisting of between 90 and 95% Big Macs, he is in remarkably good health. Gorske ate his 30,000th Big Mac on May 4, 2018. Despite this level of OCD, he even admits he often can’t really taste the burgers. He is in amazingly good health, with his weight at around average and his cholesterol well below average.

There is a certain amount of comfortable familiarity with something as simple as a slightly insipid burger. In the interest of research, I ate a kid’s Happy Meal at McDonald’s the other day… I have to say I think the child’s mother overreacted.

The fact is that Ronald McDonald is in more countries than the Roman Catholic Church. Such is the power of the ‘Golden Arches’ that while digging for the foundations of a restaurant in Frattocchie – just outside of Rome – a perfectly preserved roman road was unearthed, along with three tombs and they just went ahead and built the restaurant on top of it anyway, all be it with a glass floor making this little out of the way burger bar the worlds first ever museum/fast food restaurant.

The road, a 45-meter-long stretch, was a branch off the Appian Way, something of a superhighway at the time, one of the most strategically and commercially important of the era. The road was in use for centuries and fell into disrepair and disuse around 1,500 years ago, as evidenced by the skeletal remains of three men, all aged under 40, that they found entombed in the gutters of the road. The three men were likely slaves or maybe soldiers, hence the improvised burial site. When the site was uncovered, McDonald’s Italia made the decision to excavate and preserve the site.

A lot of the time with Roman remains like this the site is simply reburied, it being a cost-effective way of preserving the site, Italy is covered in sites of historical significance, too many to protect them all, The Є300,000 price tag was covered by the company to preserve and present the finds, there is no McDonald’s livery around the find, which McDonald’s’ have pledged to pay the upkeep for, and it is possible to visit the site just to see the remains without having to buy a burger.

So if tucking into a cheeseburger while you gaze into the hollow eye sockets of a dead Roman slave sounds like a good date, then Frattocchie is the place for you. Well, there and therapy. McDonald’s hasn’t always seen eye to eye with the nation of Italy, though. In 2016, the company sued the city of Florence for Є18 million when the city blocked the opening of a restaurant in its historic plaza.

There are other restaurants that fall under the category of weird and wonderful, from the UFO-inspired restaurant in Roswell, New Mexico, which, one can only assume, has the best drive-through in the galaxy, to the burger bar in New Zealand that is partially built into a retired aircraft. There was, at one point, a floating McDonald’s – the McBrage – located in Vancouver, Canada, built for the 1986 World’s Fair, now sadly in disrepair.

McDonald’s is a commercial juggernaut and a massive part of the economy, 7% of the potatoes grown in the United States are destined to be served as a side order with a burger, and the company employs more than one million people there every year.

For one of these workers to make what the current CEO makes in one hour, they would have to work every day for 7 months. McDonald’s isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, both in the sense that they produce burgers that are seemingly impervious to decay, the 1.5 billion plastic toys that they hand out every year and the environmental impact of the restaurant chain as a whole, we are stuck with the Golden Arches and will be for some considerable time.

Have it your way,

RBD