Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles used to have McDonald’s on the groundfloor. You’d go to the doctor and he’d say “alright we’ll run the tests, come back in an hour,” and you’d go with your mom to McDonald’s and wait.
In 1989, when it opened, a lot of people said “how dare you,” because, as many famous thinkers have said, McDonald’s isn’t the healthiest food in the world. But in 1989 the hospital told those people to go fuck themselves.
I met someone recently who works at Children’s Hospital and I mentioned this McDonald’s and she said “it closed.” “What?” “It closed a long time ago.” “Why?” “There was a whole movement to get all the McDonald’s in all the hospitals closed.” “So woke killed the McDonald’s?” “I mean ok, sure, yes.”
I looked it up and found out she ain’t lyin! It closed about a decade ago in response to some activists writing open letters. Serious publications like The Atlantic wrote about it and unserious publications like Salon also wrote about it.
It was replaced with a new cafe which has much better Yelp scores, but also sells crap like hamburgers. It looks to me like the kids can still inhale a few thousand calories in a very short time span, but at least people will feel better about it.
It got me thinking about my own relationship with that McDonald’s. The fact that it is not healthy is not terribly controversial. It can be overstated! There was a documentary 20 years ago called Super Size Me where Morgan Spurlock ate McDonald’s every day for a month and his health declined and it became a hit and everyone gasped because there was gambling in this casino, but then a bunch of people looked at it and he wasn’t just going and ordering the reasonable orders. He was ordering the worst things on the menu! And this other guy, who would make a helluva substacker, made a response documentary where he went and did the premise but instead of ordering 11 double quarter pounders, he had, like, a McChicken wrap and an unsweetened iced tea, and he lost weight. The conclusion seemed to be that if you count calories at McDonald’s you’ll be fine, just like if you count calories anywhere. Which is exactly what the Children’s Hospital administrator said in 1989 in response to people getting mad:
“There are a lot of things you could get there on a balanced diet, but you have to select very carefully.”
But let’s just accept the premise that fast food, in general, isn't the healthiest thing in the world.
I go to McDonald’s only a few times a year, but I would consider myself a McDonald’s defender. I think it is solid fast food. It is not In-N-Out. But it is reliable and tasty. I’d certainly rather eat at McDonald’s than Wendy’s, which has some hideous evil devil child as the logo.
In the Salt Lake City airport, they used to have a Burger King and it was disgusting. Then eventually it was replaced with a McDonald’s and people were thrilled. The Mormons squealed with delight.
McDonald’s is the ultimate comfort food for me. I like the McNuggets with Hot Mustard sauce. And it got me wondering if I think of it as comfort food, because when I was little and had to go to Children’s Hospital in LA, it meant a break from the poking and prodding at my eye. This is at least a somewhat plausible theory that cannot be immediately dismissed. It’s also possible I like them because everyone likes them. They’re delicious.
Let’s put a pin in this for a second while I think about it, and I’ll circle back at the end.
The most famous McDonald’s in history was opened in Moscow in 1990. The Soviet Union was teetering, but it was a year from actually falling, so this was a big deal. It was opened by McDonald’s Canada. They’d been trying to do it for a while, but it was complicated, and eventually Gorbachev had done enough reforms that it could work out, and so McDonald’s Canada introduced Happy Meals to Moscow. They had to build up entire supply chains because you couldn’t just plug this into the global supply chain like you would in a normal country. Everything had to be from within the Soviet bloc. But that was doable because the Soviet Union loved Western money because it was real as opposed to their money, which was fake.
But the Canadian McDonald’s team was insistent on brand standards. So they sent all of these Canadians to Moscow to teach the Russians how to make Big Macs, which the Russians called Big Maks because they love the letter k. But they also had to teach them other things, like smiling.
