Confessions of a Fast Food Addict

I had a long and tumultuous affair with fast food. It probably started when I was a kid; I remember begging my mother to take me to McDonalds. Those juicy QuarterPounders with cheese, ketchup and pickles called to me when she drove down 23^rd street. Once every couple of weeks, she’d pull over and take us in. My brother and I were proud when we graduated from the Happy Meal to the Big Mac. Even the commercials in the 70s promoted this “right of passage” with the little boy looking up at his dad and the dad saying, “I think you are ready for a Big Mac.” McDonalds marketing has always been powerful and effective. Once they get you in the door, the fat-and salt-laden food closes the deal. I craved the food so much as a kid that I would beg and whine at my mother and be deeply disappointed when she drove on past the restaurant. I wanted to go even though my dad would purposely embarrass me by ordering a whopper at McDonalds, or a Big Mac at Wendy’s. He thought it was really funny to get the teenagers on the other end of the drive-through speaker to say, “We don’t serve Big Macs here Sir, this is Wendy’s.” I’d be hollering at dad from the back seat. Mom just sat there laughing in the passenger seat. It took me a long time to understand that he was just pulling my chain. My brother Ken was obsessed with Coca-Cola, and mom rarely bought it for the house. He’d beg my dad to buy him a Coke and dad would say, “we’ve got drinks at home.” Dad was being prudent. Why spend the extra money on drinks when we could have water or milk at home? Ken would have a melt-down in the back seat. To this day, if I say the words, “we’ve got drinks at home,” my 40 year-old brother screams and puts his hands over his ears. Mom did a good job of limiting how often I got the food. She also worked hard to get my brother and me to eat our vegetables. What she didn’t know at the time was how big the fast food industry would become. Some people now believe, as seen in the film SuperSize Me, that McDonalds was consciously and purposefully working on creating a generation of addicts. Whether they did it on purpose or not, the marketing and fast food “high” worked on me.

Once I got a driver’s license and some spending money, I starting driving through myself. It wasn’t just McDonalds, it was the whole industry. I didn’t leave anybody out. At each establishment, I had my favorite sandwich and I would rotate through, sometimes getting attached to one particular sandwich for awhile and then switching to another. Wendy’s, Burger King, Arby’s, and McDonalds got a lot of my money from 1982 until 2002. That is twenty years of hamburgers. I would try to limit myself to eating the food only once a week. Honestly, now I have no idea how often I really ate it, as I was in denial about it. I certainly ate the food once a week, but I remember having conversations with myself about how long it had been. I’d try to keep myself from eating it “too much,” but every time I’d drive by, if I hadn’t had lunch, I’d pull through. Gripping the wheel, my knuckles would start to turn white as I would chant in my head, “don’t do it, don’t turn.” Before I knew it, I was whipping that wheel around and dragging my way into the drive-through line. I’m convinced that many people have these same conversations with themselves about fast food. The stuff is highly addictive; we have addict-like conversations with ourselves. We want that rush of fat, sugar, and salt into our system that we’ve learned to expect and enjoy. The rush is followed by a crash about 45 minutes later.