Recalling the joy of processed food
A New York Times essay stirs memories of my relationship with the "Great American foods"
Every once and a while I encounter an essay or piece of writing that resonates with me on a fundamental level. No, not in the “Well said; I couldn’t agree more” sense, but in the rarer “This gets me on a deep, personal level” sense.
The New York Times’ Adrian Rivera is the author of such an essay. “I Am Mourning the Loss of Something I Loved: McNuggets” is a reflection on childhood, maturity, and yearning for a distant and bygone past — and the disappointment that so often comes when trying to recreate it.
Like Rivera, my childhood was often filled with “cheap” food. Sure, my single mother would make “real” food from time to time (I’m still very fond of her meatloaf, for the record), and my grandmother would usually prepare fresh dishes for us (I’m still trying to find an adequate replacement for her chicken and noodles). And during the occasional weekend at my dad’s, my step-mother would make all sorts of different dishes, mostly from scratch. At no point as a child was I wanting for food.
Yet my strongest food-related memories involve my mom heating up frozen Salisbury steaks and instant mashed potatoes, fish sticks and canned green beans, macaroni and cheese (fluorescent orange, of course) and hot dogs — or, on an especially busy evening, a TV dinner with a nuclear-hot brownie for dessert. There’s something about the taste of these processed foods that no “finer” food can replicate; it’s probably been 20 years since I last ate one of those brown hunks of steak in thawed brown gravy, but even now the taste lingers on my buds.
Growing up, the recollections I have of food are almost exclusively what Current Me would consider low-brow. Yes, Thanksgiving included oven roasted turkey and homemade mashed potatoes, but it also consisted of store-bought pumpkin pie topped with Cool Whip.1 Run-of-the-mill family gatherings involved afternoon runs to Burgerville, with a pad and paper tallying a dizzying number of burgers, fries, and milkshakes. Izzy’s Pizza was a favorite of ours, as was Hometown Buffet for special evenings. And, of course, we had our “fancy” restaurants like Olive Garden or Black Angus, but only on the rarest of occasions.
Rivera’s essay shares how he felt out of place at an elite university, coming from a community where processed foods reign supreme. His classmates and professors—many of whom hailed from the One Percent, the crème de la crème—had tastes in food that were foreign to him, just like his were to them. Their world was “homemade ice cream and duck and kale,” whereas Rivera’s was fast food and “the many varieties of Hamburger Helper or instant ramen.”
Rivera explains how his tastes began to change as he assimilated into this strange new community. As he eventually transitioned to the professional managerial class and became a full-fledged “costal elite,” he says these previously strange foods became more familiar. His preferences evolved, culminating with his realization one day that he was craving not Burger King or Red Lobster, but a Waldorf salad. And when he tries to go back to the comfort foods of his youth via an order of McDonald’s French fries, this never measures up to his memories.
Still, Rivera longed for an important part of his past:
I was embarrassed to find an ally in Donald Trump. His love of Big Macs, Filet-O-Fishes and Diet Coke made people’s heads explode. When he served a feast of fast food at the White House? The scandal!
Still, for me, McDonald’s in the White House sounded like a dream. It was easy to laugh at the contradictions between Mr. Trump’s cultural tastes and his class status, but I understood that those very contradictions are what made him a democrat with a lowercase d, just another American who ate processed food, what he calls “Great American food.”
This, to me, is the meat and potatoes (sorry) of this essay. Food nourishes us, but it also has the potential to divide us. The upper crust looks down on those happily dining at establishments serving food on trays, while the blue collar crowd scoffs at those excitedly consuming snail eggs and foam. Research bears this out, with studies showing increasing polarization on politics, of course, but also on entertainment and, yes, places to eat.
I’m thankful for my culinary upbringing, just as I’m thankful to my wife for introducing me to so many different kinds of fresh, homemade food. Our lives invariably move from season to season, including in terms of what and how we eat. And that’s okay.
That said, regardless of our differing preferences and tastes, I hope we’re all at one time or another fortunate enough to discover a “bonus fry.”
My wife still gives me a hard time about the Cool Whip.