Fry Guy

ever since i sat down and read eric schlosser's book Fast Food Nation, i have developed an unhealthy appreciation (read: addiction) for McDonald's french fries.

Unfortunately, the book's contents are not designed to make you love french fries, or any other fast food for that matter. From start to finish, it provides painstaking detail on how fast food giants seemingly made people fat, kept small-scale suppliers poor and disorganized, made workers unhappy and/or sick, and made vegetarians unknowingly eat animal products.

If all those were true (and the author does make a convincing case by doing the research), does it make you think twice before ordering a Happy Meal?

Some excerpts from the book:

"The taste of McDonald's French fries, for example, has long been praised by customers, competitors and even food critics. James Beard, the legendary American gourmet, loved McDonald's fries. Their distinctive taste does not stem from the type of potatoes that McDonald's buys, the technology that processes them, or the restaurant equipment that fries them. Other chains buy their French fries from the same large processing companies, use Russet Burbanks and have similar fryers in their restaurant kitchens. The taste of a fast-food fry is largely determined by the cooking oil. For decades, McDonald's cooked its French fries in a mixture of about 7% cottonseed oil and 93% beef tallow. The mix gave the fries their unique flavour - and more saturated beef fat per ounce than a McDonald's hamburger. "

"Amid a barrage of criticism over the amount of cholesterol in its fries, McDonald's switched to pure vegetable oil in 1990. The switch presented the company with an enormous challenge: how to make fries that subtly taste like beef without cooking them in tallow. A look at the ingredients now used in the preparation of McDonald's French fries suggests how the problem was solved. At the end of the list is a seemingly innocuous yet oddly mysterious phrase: "natural flavour". That ingredient helps to explain not only why the fries taste so good, but also why most fast food - indeed, most of the food Americans eat today - tastes the way it does."

skipping a few lines:

"The McDonald's Corporation will not reveal the exact origin of the natural flavour added to its French fries. In response to enquiries from Vegetarian Journal, however, McDonald's did acknowledge that its fries derive some of their characteristic flavour from 'animal products.'"

Enough said. Go do Eric Schlosser a favor and buy his book instead of cribbing from this blog.

Anyway, rather than shy away from fast food, the reverse thing happened. I am the last person on this planet who would be a vegetarian, and the knowledge that fries are far from all-veggie may have crept subconsciously into my brain.

All i know is that my heightened awareness for that unique beefy taste has led me to buy more fries than i usually do. Nowadays, i find it hard to share a single order of large fries.

But somehow, i don't think this is what the author intended.