Undersize Me

McDonald's has unveiled the new Chipotle BBQ wrap, available in
either deep fried or grilled chicken options. It's actually
quite good in the grilled version, and, in deference, to my
waistline I did not try the the deep fried version. The
chipotle sauce was strong enough that I could smell it in the
bag, and it was hot. The sauce was tangy. The wrapping flat was
strong enough to hold together, but not so tough to prevent
eating the wrap. The chicken was hot enough to melt the cheese.
The lettuce was still crunchy despite being both covered in a
sauce that contained vinegar and with steaming hot grilled
chicken, which, again was hot enough to melt cheese. In short,
not a bad dining experience for $1.39.

The bizarre thing is that these wraps are meant to the
healthier options. Why is it bizarre, you might wonder, that a
grilled chicken wrap appears to be among the new healthier
options that McDonald's is offering to the American dining
public? Well, because if you look at what was on the menu
before, you notice: chicken sandwiches both grilled and deep
fried, breakfast burritos, McNuggets (with sauces, of course),
and salads. So, basically, these ingredients, lettuce, chicken
and so forth, are already used by McDonald's. The other wraps
are honey mustard and ranch sauced, so the wraps would appear
to belong to the "just-scrape-together-whatever-we-have-on-
hand" school of culinary arts.


So...what was stopping them from having healthier options
before? Why do I weigh 350 pounds plus? (Well, in fairness,
partially because I lift weights regularly and partially
because I no longer have a thyroid gland, but otherwise...) I
don't order french fries. I usually will get a double cheese
burger with extra pickles if I go to McDonald's, though the
breakfast menu has me sticking with either a breakfast burrito
or a steak bagel. In fact, if I may digress, McDonald's and
other fast food places, actually tend to make it easier for
someone on a diet to stick to it if they want to, because you
know, in principle, exactly what you are getting. The diabetic
exchange diet, for example, relies on knowing the values of
certain categories of foods available to you. The exchange
values of most McDonald's items are trivially available.

But even so, nobody goes to McDonald's looking for a healthy
meal. "McDonald's" is, after all, written on the sign outside.
"Come, get your coronary artery disease here" it says, in
effect. But why? They have the stuff on hand. Why haven't they
tried to make healthier food until now? Why haven't they tried
to market the healthier choices until now? The point I made
above about knowing precisely what you are getting helping you
to plan your diet was told to me by one of my anthropology
professors in college almost twenty years ago. Given that, they
could have had a marketing campaign regarding that knowledge
long ago. Mickey D's seems to have made, then, the affirmative
decision not to be considered the healthy choice until now.

The American sense of machismo, perhaps dictates that they not
knuckle under to the metrosexual point of view to avoid that
first coronary. Also, it's not easy to eat a salad from the
drive-thru., and perhaps chicken is simply more expensive than
beef and grilled chicken more. I don't know.

I do know that when I ordered my large diet coke, the cashier
suggested I upgrade to the extra-extra large for only 89 cents
as opposed to the $1.55 I was going to pay. I did, and if I had
gotten regular soda, I probably would have slipped into a
diabetic coma on the spot. As it stands, I just have to worry
about the phosphoric acid leeching the calcium from my bones.

As it stands now, the jury is still out on whether "Supersize
Me" is a documentary or a horror flick.
(One guy tried the same diet with diet
soda instead of regular and apparently lost weight.) Can
McDonald's be a healthier choice? Yes, and they always have had
that potential, but they don't necessarily seem to want to be
known as such.