Guest Blogger: Dr. Strangefood (or How I Learned to Love McDonalds) by FudgesicleJunkie

It's FRIDAY!!! TGIF MGF's. So tonight is the regular guest blogger night. We're proud to have another contribution by FudgesicleJunkie. Here is his view on Morgan Spurlock's documentary (or should I say docudrama?) about McDonalds and the effect it has on its consumers. With great wit and sarcasm...take it away FJ. ~ASilky

I’ve lived in England for almost ten years now, but I’m pleased to report that I haven’t picked up the accent. There are, however, some distinctly English words that have wormed their way into my vocabulary. I sometimes say “cheers” instead of thank you. I use the word “brilliant” as an all-purpose adjective. How’s the weather? Brilliant! How are you feeling? Brilliant!

But my favourite has to be “rubbish”. Rubbish is, of course, the English word for garbage. I don’t use it for garbage though. I still call my garbage garbage. I use rubbish where I would have once used the word “shit” to describe shit movies like Supersize Me, which really was a big pile of rubbish. It’s handy, because Supersize Me was all that the chattering classes could talk about for a while, so it was coming up a lot at dinner parties. It helps in that situation to have a comparatively polite word that you can use in mixed company to really rubbish a shit movie (see, it works as a verb too).

If you haven’t seen Supersize Me, you’ve no doubt heard about it. It is a documentary that follows Morgan Spurlock as he tries to prove how unhealthy McDonalds is by eating nothing else for 30 days. Sure enough, over the course of the film we see his health rapidly deteriorate to the point that doctors issue dire warnings about liver damage and death.

“Two thumbs up,” said Ebert & Roeper (as if Roger Ebert hasn’t enjoyed the odd Big Mac or two … or three … per day).

“A necessary wake-up call for both adults and children”.

“Your life depends on seeing this movie”.

“A social document of such importance that it should be required viewing in schools”.

Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish. Demonstrating that eating only McDonalds for a month causes ill-health is about as significant a scientific discovery as proof that inhaling water causes drowning. Was that the “necessary wake-up call” we were waiting for? McDonalds is unhealthy? I’m hitting the snooze and going back to bed. Somebody wake me when the world has smartened up.

Morgan Spurlock strikes me as the type of loser who would sit next to you in the sauna and complain about the heat. There is nothing remotely entertaining about Supersize Me, unless you enjoy the spectacle of a man systematically wrecking his health in a masochistic display of the bleeding obvious. Was there ever any doubt? Was there any suspense at all? Was anybody, anywhere thinking, “hmmm, this seems like an interesting experiment. I wonder what’ll happen?”

Even if you were daft enough to think that McDonalds might somehow come out of this rolling in clover, any such illusions were shattered the first time you were told that Spurlock’s girlfriend was a vegan chef. There is no way that McDonalds is going to get a fair shake out of a documentary when the director is shacked up with a militant, granola-eating wholemeal breadhead.

Not that I have anything against vegans, mind you. If you get your kicks from alfalfa sprouts, who am I to complain? What I object to is that rising band of proselytising, evangelical health food advocates, with suspect degrees from Happy Clappy University, who have turned my morning breakfast into a chilling game of Russian Roulette.

Wholemeal toast? <click>
Glass of milk? <click>
Oat bran cereal? <click>
Scrambled egg? You're dead! A fucking egg!? You must be crazy!

I actually do believe there is a place for documentaries that relay important truths about the food we eat. Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver recently aired Jamie’s School Dinners, in which he went behind the scenes at English public schools to reveal that children were being fed a daily diet of recycled pub snacks. That was something we needed to now. When you send your kid to public school, you expect him to come home hooked on phonics, not on pork scratchings.

What great truth did Spurlock uncover? That McDonalds is fattening? I already knew that! And I didn’t have to subject myself to a life threatening experiment to figure it out. That’s how clever I am. I pretty much guessed it the first time somebody charged me 99¢ for a quarter-pound of beef served in less than 30 seconds. Nothing served that quickly and that cheap is ever going to be good for you, is it?

And that’s all I really want from my McDonalds: fast and cheap. That’s what it’s for. You’d think all the hippie druids would appreciate it too. It leaves them all with more time and money to spend hanging out in the Brazilian rainforest having tantric sex with Sting.

But no. Thanks to movies like Supersize Me, it has become the most vilified corporation in the world. Every anti-globalisation gathering now ends with a peace-loving mob of drippy liberals lobbing a park bench through the window of the nearest McDonalds. If there isn’t one nearby, they will re-route the march just to find it. We used to go to San Francisco with flowers in our hair. But now a protest just ain’t a protest unless McDonalds gets a right pasting.

McDonalds, admittedly, can be accused of many things, but I don’t think the Iraq War is one of them. Yet anti-war protesters in London even trashed the McDonalds on Whitehall, which is just up the road from the Prime Minister’s house. The police in London, these days, will shoot you for wearing long sleeves in July, so no one is crazy enough to vandalise 10 Downing Street. Instead, those cuddly doves – so incensed by the needless slaughter of the innocent – turned their sanctimonious rage on a poor, defenceless McDonalds. Come to think of it, there’s a health benefit that Spurlock failed to mention – McDonalds’ staff will not shoot you: FACT.

Here’s another one: McDonalds will let you use their bathroom without making you buy anything. Anyone who doesn’t recognise that as a major health benefit has never been stuck on the streets of Paris or Rome or Beijing or New York in urgent need of a whizz. Caught in that predicament, you’d sing hosannas at the sight of a giant yellow M. A McDonalds bathroom isn’t especially luxurious either, but compared to the public facilities in Paris, it’s a five-star health spa. In London, Her Majesty’s lavatories are decked out with blacklights that make your teeth glow and give the décor that eerie feel of an 80’s nightclub. I am told that this makes it impossible for intravenous drug users to find their veins. Lovely. Thankfully, you don’t get that at McDonalds. Heroin addicts hate McDonalds. Too unhealthy.

Fast, cheap and free bathrooms with no syringes – I would die for that restaurant!

If we really must go on these anti-fast-food witch hunts, couldn’t we at least pick on someone more deserving of our bile? You know who I’m talking about. That Colonel Sanders needs to be dunked in a giant vat of grease and fat. How can we condemn McDonalds while this wicked dealer of Death In A Bucket carries on like some loveable southern gent? So vile is the very atmosphere inside Kentucky Fried Chicken that when I have the misfortune of being in one, I half-expect Charlton Heston to come barging in after me screaming “popcorn chicken is people! Popcorn chicken is people!”

In fact, I’d like to see Morgan Spurlock do a sequel where he only eats KFC for a month. He’ll be dead before the premiere. Kentucky Fried Chicken? Rubbish!