One of my fondest memories from high school here in quaint Marquette was a delightful incident of free-speech persecution by the school administration. My crime? Violating the dress code for daring to wear one of the few good birthday gifts I’ve ever gotten, a shirt from the owner of my favorite coffee shop. Defunct for decades now, EmmaJoes AKA Common Grounds was where my first relationship and first of many terrible relationships started. Yet despite toxic and coercive then-friends and exes, despite spending days on a couch watching the entire run of Star Trek the Next Generation, despite the off-putting local poet ‘Crazy Larry’ hanging around until threatening to assassinate President Bush with a pistol he had in his suitcase, the brief life of the coffee shop was joyous. And my loyalty to the coffee shop led me to be rewarded with more diverse friendships, store credits for helping out at open mic nights, learning to rock climb with the cool college students who invited me to parties I avoided, and of course the infamous shirt.
The shirt itself said ‘McShit’, with a parodic-yet-accurate rendering of their Golden Arches, a perfect expression of my own vegetarian anti-corporate mindset. That was about twenty-five years ago and my attitude towards McDonald’s has only congealed like the contents of the grease dumpster they have out back. So let’s light that toxic dumpster fire with abridged tour of why I still hate McDonald’s. There are few places besides cathedrals that my heathen self loathes enough to avoid stepping foot in, yet McDonald’s could not pay me enough to repeat that mistake again! Why?
Related: microplastics in McDonald’s fruit pouches marketed to kids
The smell is always off-putting to me; according to the fringe astrological system called Human Design, my nose knows. In my music scene days, I could always smell a so-called ‘safety meeting’ from across the building like one of those poor police drug dogs trained to ruin innocent stoners’ days. The turbid reality of McDonald’s ingredients is no secret at this point. Putting my past PEtA associations aside, we all know that McDonald’s is less real than the intelligence in AI even if ChatGPT is not smart enough to take the job of making fast food burgers and fries even though it has been used in robotics; while whole PizzaHuts have been roboticized before, fast food work will remain the domain of poor humans for the indefinite future.
And the smell of McDonald’s certainly lingers worse than the two mice my poor cat killed, ate, and spat up yesterday; though frankly even to my near-vegan sensibilities the thrown up mice sound about on par with McDonald’s chicken nuggets, since unlike many vegetarians my visceral dislike for dead animal products far outweighs even more-rational my views of their drawbacks. It’s the lingering smell of failing to produce food meant for actual consumption, the smell of slow self-annihilation. Just like the smell of days-old curdled beef tallow in those fries lost in someone’s car on the floor behind the driver’s seat.
You might ask if my beef with McDonald’s goes deeper and it certainly does. Like the Amazon rainforest clearcut for fast food cattle, the environmental impact of fastfood in general burns the life and breath out of me. It’s not just animal cruelty, it’s destroying the very lungs of the Earth, planting soybean monocrops (note: which is where most corn and soy goes, to things like livestock feed as well as chemical industries, and not much to direct human consumption), relying on so much plastic and styrofoam waste, and the horrors only go deeper from there.
Related: (see fast food in Saudi Arabia)
And not that I have any sympathy for franchise owners, but those enterprising sellers of pseudofoods can’t even repair their own machines sine the corporation built them with proprietary secret sauce components years before McDonald’s executives even made weird racist rants on social media. If you think that’s a non-sequitur, it is and I’m mentioning it to highlight the perversely cruel irony of McDonald’s relying on poor people of color especially. While right-to-repair may be changing that it’s still painfully obvious that exploiting their workers, poisoning their semi-addicted customers, and destroying the environment is not enough for these fast food robber barons; they also have to quadruple dip on their feudal franchise owners. Yes, this is par for the gutter course of corporate techno-feudalism that we’re gurgling along in unless individual consumers become connected creators.
Finally, the most damning thing about McDonald’s is in how incredibly boring it is even compares to their competitors. While McDonald’s is ubiquitous, that ubiquity only makes their mediocrity all the more McShitty.
