Things have changed now and maybe it’s my resentment at having to choose what I eat a bit more carefully that drives me to revile McDonalds. No, of course it isn’t that – I’m not bitter about developing love handles, it’s simply that with age comes wisdom and in my case a more uncompromising response to the insidious influence of mass marketing on our lives. I ask you, what is a better symbol of global consumer culture than the Big Mac?
Let me ask you another question - ultimately, what is advertising all about? It’s about selling an ideal. It’s about selling something you don’t need on the premise that it will make your life better. Eating a burger, for example, will apparently make you popular and cool. I’m lovin’ it – here, McDonalds is telling you that you love Big Macs – even though you don’t. Okay, so it isn’t exactly subtle or sophisticated but it’s still bullshit. As far as I’m concerned it’s about selling a big fat fucking lie. McDonalds marketing campaigns must have, over the years, told more lies to more individuals than every single politician on the planet, ever. After all, each time the bastards show us a picture of a Big Mac selling us another deceit!
I admit I might be getting a bit carried away here, but I think we should all have something upon which we can vent our frustration, whether it be people in front of us taking inordinate amounts of time to withdraw cash at ATMs or Celine Dion. Therefore, McDonalds has become my scapegoat for all the wrongs in the world over which I have no control. Upon this global behemoth of a business which has insinuated itself into every corner of the planet I pour all my hate and revile for all the lies we’ve been forced to swallow, all the lifestyle compromises we’ve been compelled to make and all the average food we’ve chosen to eat - to the extent that I now find myself becoming angry whenever I’m in the vicinity of one of their “restaurants” - I start glowering and spitting and have been known to shout drunken insults at their customers. The smell of the place particularly winds me up, that sanitised, sickly sweet, greasy, rubbery, plastic-coated odour that drifts through the swing doors and assaults you as you walk by – I almost suffer an allergic reaction to the place my repulsion is so powerful. Many a time I have had to qwell an instinct to launch a brick through the window.
I know of course that in this matter I am indulging in myself a sort of hypocrisy because in many ways the choices I make in my lifestyle do not reflect the opinions I indulge in myself when it comes to the subject of fast food. For example, I am a smoker. I pollute my own body and the bodies of those around me who are forced to breathe my smoke. For this reason alone I reckon my opinion counts little. However, thanks to the concept of freedom of speech that democracy holds so dearly I can still gripe and groan as much as I like about the distasteful habits of others and be as hypocritical as I like in the process. I might add that it is this same democracy which is hand in glove with capitalism and is therefore to some extent responsible for the freedom with which corporations like McDonalds can sell their wares.
However, none of my high-minded ethical beliefs were able to alter the fact that, after a week in Thailand, I found myself hankering after a Whopper.
A Whopper is okay though! Isn’t it? It’s flame-grilled, after all! If McDonalds is the devil then Burger King and KFC are his right hand men. I will deal with them if I have to but I won’t like it one little bit. I figure I can’t go through life never eating fast food (I’m sure some people can - hippy, quorn-popping vegetarian types for example) because a lot of my friends enjoy the taste of an average burger and I wouldn’t dream of foisting my prejudices on them and spoiling their fun when we’re out and about, so I compromise with the likes of Burger King. However, to find myself in Thailand, resplendent as it with such wonderful, fragrant, diverse, healthy and tasty food and to be hankering after a burger is tantamount to treason against my stomach, but who am I to resist thirty years of programming?
My brother Tom and I woke before dawn in Chiang Mai in the north of Thailand. We were due to catch a commuter flight to Bangkok which would connect with a flight to Surat Thani where we would get on a boat to Koh Pha Ngan and begin the second part of our holiday which would mainly involve lazing on the beach. After the rigours of steamy night train journeys and jungle trekking it would be a welcome break. The sun had not yet risen as we sat in the airport departure lounge sipping hot coffee and munching Dunkin Donuts, discussing how we would spend the five hour stopover in Bangkok before our connecting flight to Surat Thani was scheduled to leave. Maybe it was the e-numbers in the frosting on my donut which influenced my thought processes when I said, “I really fancy a Burger King!”
Tom did not take much persuading. At that moment it seemed so right – that burger, those fries, that fizzy drink, those little plastic tubs of sauce… surely we deserved all that after getting up at 5am? I found myself becoming quite excited as the plane descended towards Bangkok, anticipating the satisfying bulk of my Whopper clenched between my greasy fingers as I prepared to take my first bite. I experienced a dawning sense of horror as we disembarked a few minutes later into what quickly became apparent was the worst airport I’d ever had the misfortune of visiting. This was one of Bangkok’s provicial airports, not the glorious, sprawling, post-modern monstrosity I had expected to find myself in, an airport boasting every kind of eastern and western food known to man.
This airport didn’t even boast a place to sit down. In a daze we found some seats and plonked ourselves into them but were then told they were reserved for monks only. As we wandered around contemplating how on earth we were going to spend five hours in this place and stay sane I spotted a sign advertising a shuttle bus to Bangkok’s other airport, the one with the Burger King. Assuring Tom that the only way to effectively kill five hours between flights was to keep busy, we boarded the bus and waited patiently for it to depart. Two hours later we were on the other side of Bangkok and stuck in a traffic jam but very close to the other airport and our burger brunch. I began to appreciate the scale of the endeavour we had undertaken in order to eat Whoppers. Our burger consumption turn-around time would be minimal if we stood any chance of making it back to the first airport in order to catch our flight.
We jumped off the bus and walked swiftly into the departure terminal, grabbing the first official-looking person we could find and pumping him for burger franchise location related information.
“No sir. There is no burger here. You must be passing through customs in order to eat the burger.”
The phrase blinded by greed kept popping into my head as the bus crawled through the traffic, headed back towards the original airport, the one I had now concluded we should never have left in the first place. This was associated with a sinking feeling in my stomach which was exacerbated every time I glanced in Tom’s direction and spotted the slightly wild look in his eye and panicked expression on his face. The bus moved very slowly. Time passed very quickly. With half an hour to go until our flight was scheduled to leave, Tom commented, “34 kilometres to go,” - his voice was even but I could almost taste the accusation in it. 34 kilometres?! Impossible!
“No mate,” I said, vainly attempting to maintain my cool, “No way. We’re nearly there!”
“I’ve just seen a sign. It said 34 kilometres to the airport.”
So appalled was I at the prospect of missing our flight that, in that instant, I calculated that we still had enough time to catch our flight. We had to travel 34 kilometres in 30 minutes AND check in AND get to our gate in time to board. I was delluded. I was delusional.
For a couple of minutes I sat sweating, staring out of the window, my eyes darting from one sign to the next as we travelled along the expressway, desperately trying to extract some kind of meaning from them – meaning that would prove my younger brother wrong and make me feel a whole lot better about the predicament I had landed us both in. Eventually I spotted a sign for the airport. It didn’t say how far we were away but it did inform me that we were travelling along Route 34.
Route 34? ROUTE 34?! I didn’t know whether to punch the little bugger or kiss him. Ten minutes later the bus pulled up outside the airport departure terminal and we scurried off to find the check-in desk. However, our ordeal wasn’t quite over. At the desk the young woman behind the counter looked nervous and confused as she typed our particulars into her computer. We stood waiting for five minutes as she procrastinated, her colleagues standing behind her appeared to be looking at us and fidgeting uncomfortably. I started to think that our seats had been given away. With incalculable relief I finally heard the reassuring zing of a dot matrix printer and a moment later our boarding passes were handed to us. For the second time in the space of half an hour I wanted to kiss my little brother.
“There was never any doubt,” I said magnanimously as I settled into my cramped aeroplane seat and buckled myself in. Tom looked at me incredulously but said nothing. Clearly the sense of relief he was experiencing overshadowed any resentment he felt towards me for making him run the gauntlet for the last five hours. For my part, I felt immensely pleased with myself for constructing such an exciting set of circumstances in which to spend a five hour stopover. We could have sat around that crummy airpoirt experiencing wrist-slitting boredom. Instead we had a mini adventure.
In the end I had a Whopper at Bangkok’s gloriously monstrous and swanky new international airport with only minutes to spare before I had to board my flight to India, where it’s quite hard to find a beef burger on account that cows are considered too good for mincing there. Eating that burger in that airport was a guilty pleasure… in fact, if I recall correctly there was not a great deal of pleasure involved in the experience – it was more like a strange, feverish compulsion.
Grace and Jess, my Australian friends who I had left behind a couple of days previously on Koh Tao, would not have been impressed. After I had finished my burger I recalled a story that Jess had told me about an Englishman she had witnessed coming into a beach restaurant and ordering a burger. He sat with his friends and was generally repulsive and insulting towards them until his burger arrived, at which point he shut up for the three minutes it took for him to stuff his face full of his burger and fries. There was no pleasure there, she said, no reflection, nothing registered on his face as he concentrated on consuming his food as swiftly as possible, as if he were some kind of robot who has been programmed only to eat burgers and do nothing else.
I looked around the airport restaurant and saw a sea of blank faces, the only sign of life, jaws chewing. With a shudder I assessed my own very recent burger eating experience – it was still fresh, the empty wrapper was in front of me and the sour aftertaste of it still in my mouth – and I realised I was no different. I knew my face had been blank and I had thought of nothing during the three minutes it had taken me to finish my Whopper. What is it about these places that make the process of eating so bland and functional, so devoid of pleasure? What is food without pleasure?
Over the last few years McDonalds have seen a drop in their sales, presumably because people are beginning to realise what a terrible con it has been all this time. I was delighted to witness one of their restaurants in Bristol close down. What a coup! I felt like dancing. In the world of global commerce even a one percent drop in sales equates to millions of dollars and in response to this relative disaster McDonalds have introduced new ranges of supposedly healthy food – salads, wraps and - I was staggered to learn – apples! These days you can go into a McDonalds restaurant and buy an apple! People, don’t buy your apples from McDonalds, get them from your nearest green grocer!
McDonalds are not fooling me for a minute. Pause for a moment and consider their freaky clown mascot Ronald. You don’t have to have read Stephen King’s book IT to know that clowns are evil. Evil I tell you! Hamburgler was always the good guy, valiantly trying to rid the world of McDonalds’ obnoxious burgers but continually scuppered by Ronald and his little cronies. I remember a recent TV advert in which Ronald leads a gang of healthy, bright-eyed kids through a park and into a McDonalds restaurant, the point being that if you bought enough Big Macs then McDonalds would contribute sports equipment to your kids’ school. What’s the subtext here? Eat McDonalds and get healthy? Please.
But don’t listen to me - I once almost gave up drinking Coca Cola because the adverts on TV at Christmas were so utterly dreadful and offensive. In the end I realised if I did then I wouldn’t have anything to drink my Jack Daniels with and that would never do would it?
 |  |
No comments:
Post a Comment