On the important French Fry Question

Maureen Anderson manders at midway.uchicago.edu
Sat Jan 20 17:36:42 PST 2001



>do you have hardee's in yr neck of the woods? best burgers of all, i think,
>though they did decline when they stopped char-broiling them a decade or
>more ago.
>

O the char-broiled Hardee's Huskie, coveted burger of my youth!

Alas they don't have Hardee's in Chicago and they even seem to have left southeastern Michigan where I knew them as a kid. But last year, while travelling through MI's upper peninsula, I was thrilled to see them everywhere.

After we passed the first few I finally broke down and made my travel companion pull in to the next one. ...The burger was good, certainly as good as Burger King's, but you're right they're just not the same now. (And yes Doug, Burger King's are superior -- at least in the big-burger category. You can actually taste some of the tomato and beef but without sacrificing that nice overall junk-food taste. The perfect balance.) I asked the sweet high school cashier what'd happened to their famous char-broiled burgers. But I might as well have been describing record albums or the Reagan era; he had no idea what I was talking about.

=sigh= We never ate at restaurants when I was a kid. The family-of-ten thing. But a couple times a year (stored in the memory next to other grand cyclical Events like watching Wizard of Oz), Dad'd let us have us two hamburgers each from a fastfood place. I still remember the frisson of being handed the crisp twenty dollar bill, of running in to the joint while Dad'd wait in the car, ordering twenty-five burgers (older brothers usually chipped in to buy a third), the employees looking incredulously at my pipsqueak self and asking me to display the money first, breathing in the aroma from the three big steamy bags on the way home...

Nowadays I've a fine appreciation for all sorts of cuisines. Still, on those occasions when I do go to a fastfood joint (pretty infrequent -- except of course when visiting MomandDad), it's like some primordial part of my psyche takes over. I schnarf down the whole burger and fries in two-seconds, which I usually don't realize has happened until noticing the bemused look on a dining companion's face. (But since I'm an ectomorph my conspicuous schnarfing is usually seen as a cute quirk rather than indexical of non-professional class indiscipline.)


>he read that the lg. and reg. fry sizes aren't that different. so,
>he spent a day driving around to all the mcdonald's in the area, buy
>one of each size at different stores. brought them back and weighed
>them all and sho'nuf, there wasn't enough of a difference to speak
>-- and surely not worth the extra $. :)

That is surprising. Doesn't this go against the whole capitalist principle of luring you into more than you need by showing you how much money you save? Like Dominos charging fifteen bucks for the first pizza and - what? - four for the second. At any rate I think there are only two fry sizes, "large" and "supersize" (formerly small and large, then medium and large), in a lot of places now.

getting hungry, Maureen



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list