When
McDonald's staged a gourmet feast, it reminded me of the time I judged a Spam
cooking contest.
By
Now here’s a dinner I wish I could’ve attended. I hear it was an
elegant evening of fine dining in New York City’s chic Tribeca neighborhood.
Celebrity chefs prepared a sumptuous spread of international
cuisines for this truly unique ballet for the taste buds. The feast was
supposed to be “a transforming dining experience,” the
Associated Press reports.
Actually, it was more of a mind-bending affair, hosted by
McDonald’s.
And this isn’t a joke. The fast-food mega-chain of cheap eats
used the dinner to make another stab at enhancing its image. This time around,
it tried to convince reporters that its food is actually healthy, fresh,
high-quality, and even worthy of gourmet dining.
The closest I’ve come to such culinary pretension was years ago
when I reluctantly agreed to judge a Spam cooking contest. This required
choking down bites of Spam Fricassee, Coquille St. Spam, and Spam Spumoni. It
was the food equivalent of dressing a pig in an evening gown.
Some things are simply what they are — and it’s best not to
fancy them up.
Nonetheless, McDonald’s richly paid honchos keep trying to
elevate their corporate image from fast-food purveyors of sugar and fat to — as
the Tribeca gourmet event tried to claim — an epicurean establishment offering
“good food served fast.”
All this smoke and mirrors and the rhetoric and stunts are
supposed to create a single illusion. “We’ve got to make sure the food is
relevant,” proclaimed McDonald’s CEO Don Thompson.
Get real! Whether trying to gloss over its exploitation of
low-wage workers or its health-challenging Big Macs, the McDonald’s image won’t
change until the corporation does.
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator,
writer, and public speaker. He’s also editor of the populist newsletter, The
Hightower Lowdown. OtherWords.org