http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/...he-highway-to-
heart-disease/



Breakfast from hell on the highway to heart disease.

by David Penberthy

06 Apr 06:00am



It’s finally happened. I never thought I would encounter a form of junk
food which repulsed me. But on a holiday to the US last month I was
confronted by a foodstuff so disgusting, so evil both in design and
execution, so incredibly, inedibly putrid that my entire value system has
been shocked to its core.

The McGriddle: tasty snack or pointer to the collapse of western
civilisation?

Despite generally having a healthy diet, and spending hours flitting about
the kitchen knocking up all sorts of effeminate dishes, such as a deeply
suss saffron risotto with home-made chicken stock, or pesto with basil
gathered from the garden in a poncy basket, I’ve long held a perverse
enthusiasm for eating crap.

The crapper the better. Dodgy kebabs, late-night chiko rolls, shallow-
fried at home out of the box hidden in the back of the freezer, even those
mysterious Hot Pizza Heroes from the local servo, turbo-charged before
microwaving with the addition of extra cheese and half a handful of
jalapeños.

The item which has challenged more than two decades of culinary self-abuse
goes by the innocent-sounding name of the McGriddle and is made, as the
name suggests, by the generally good people at McDonalds.

Invented in 2003 – probably by a bunch of stoned 20-year-olds – the
McGriddle makes that cheese-injected pizza crust developed some years ago
by Dominos seem healthy. Its name implies something toasted or dry-fried,
but this is misleading. The McGriddle is a sandwich-shaped memorial to the
Exxon Valdez disaster.

Hoping for a breakfast pick-me-up after the long flight from Sydney, and
keen for a new junk food experience, I grabbed a McGriddle at the Los
Angeles Airport, unwrapped it, stared at it in disbelief, bit into it,
gagged on it, and threw it away.

The filling is routine enough – egg, cheese and bacon, straight egg and
cheese, or my favourite, egg, cheese and sausage – but it’s the weirdness
that envelopes it that should be the subject of a formal investigation.
Two chubby, fried pancakes which have been injected with maple syrup, and
which spray gooey brown ooze all over your hands, into the air and
straight down the back of the throat the moment you bite into them.

There’s so much fat in the McGriddle that you can see the thing glistening
through the wrapper. If you left it unattended for more than five minutes
it would bust out and go on a murderous spree. What’s more, its evil
inventors seem to have even added sugar to the egg omelette lurking
within. It’s more of a practical joke than a dish, weighing in at a heart-
stopping 420 calories, with more fat than a Big Mac and more sugar than a
box of McDonalds cookies.

American food gets a bum rap, as do Americans. Not all American food is
rubbish and not all Americans are obese.

The emblematic roadside diners provide a terrific variety of dishes, many
of them healthy. And the nation’s less-healthy signature dishes should be
seen in the context of the country’s history. I spent a week in the
southern state of North Carolina where the heavy corn-based diet owes much
to the region’s history of slavery, where black men and women who laboured
under duress for 16-hour days needed a fatty and stodgy diet to survive,
hence the popularity of dishes such as hush puppies (deep-fried cornmeal
dumplings) and grits (sort of like wet polenta, usually flavoured with
cheese). At a traditional southern restaurant in Chapel Hill, Mama Dip’s,
named after its elderly black lady owner, I soldiered through a breakfast
comprising a fried chicken maryland with gravy, potatoes fried in bacon
fat, two poached eggs, “biscuits” (lighter versions of scones), a side
order of fried green tomatoes and two cups of that wonderfully bitter
brewed American coffee. It was awesome, but we didn’t eat again until 9pm.

On a road trip to the jazz era town of Asheville in western North Carolina
at the base of the Appalachians, we detoured to the barbecue capital of
Lexington for a pulled pork sandwich, where pork shoulder is rubbed with
spices and slow-cooked for hours with hickory and mesquite and served in a
soft bun with a punchy vinegar dressing, the same dressing that’s used on
the traditional local coleslaw which contains nothing over than savoy
cabbage. It was a pretty healthy lunch – or it would have been, if not for
the fact that it came served on a massive bed of French fries, corrugated
to maximise the surface area, with individual servings of soft drink
coming in a minimum 1 litre jug serving.

It’s this tendency towards dialling up the calorie count with excessive
sides which mars American food – that, and the ever-presence of junk
options at the expense of healthy options. The most remarkable culinary
feature of the road trip to Asheville was the road itself – a genuine
highway to heart disease.

The trip from Chapel Hill was about 300km – roughly the same as Sydney to
Canberra, a route which every junk food enthusiast knows contains two
McDonalds, two Hungry Jacks, one Subway, one KFC, and that great Mobil
roadhouse at Pheasants Nest where the burgers really are better.

Between Chapel Hill and Asheville there was an exit every 5km with
signposts to at least three if not five or six fast food joints – A&R,
Denny’s, McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy’s, Jack in the Box, Pizza Hut,
Dominos, KFC – you name it. And the poorer the towns, the more options
there were.

Imagine 50 or 60 fast food joints between Sydney and Canberra and you’ll
get the picture. It was like a hyper-inflated example of the trends we’re
seeing in Australia where the worst food options are concentrated in the
less affluent parts of town.

Given Australia’s cultural similarity to the US, our community will
probably keep heading further in this direction, rather than pulling back
from it.

My instincts on the obesity question have always been pretty libertarian,
in that people should be able to make their own choices.

But when you see and read about the damage that is being done to people’s
health – especially to their kid’s health – you can see how the actions of
the fast food industry both in terms of product development and restaurant
placement are virtually goading governments into intervention.

For all his cockney shtick, Jamie Oliver deserves credit for the work he’s
doing to educate poor communities on child nutrition. In a recent
attempted tuck-shop overhaul in the dirt-poor state of West Virginia,
Oliver met kids who could not tell the difference between a potato and a
tomato, and whose diet was so processed that they couldn’t hold a knife
and fork as they only ever used spoons.

If that doesn’t alarm you, try to get your hands on a McGriddle. I’m sure
it wasn’t their intention but, as far as this now-lapsed junk food junkie
is concerned, Maccas has perfected the principle of aversion therapy.

--
Peter Lucas
Brisbane
Australia

The Gunfighters Rule:
"Be courteous to everyone, friendly to no one. Be polite.
Be professional. But, have a plan to kill everyone you meet."