| Tuesday, December 02, 2003 |
 | Yates' Wines Lodge, Milton Keynes.
This is pretty hardcore. Even the photo seems intended to convey an air of drab, grey despair. The bouncers will let your mate in at 11:30 for a can of red bull.
Speaking of horrific mass-produced blights on an already blighted landscape, I may be mistaken but I believe as I hurtled late up Oxford Street last week that the Oxford Street Muji appears to have been replaced by another sub-Top Shop clothes store. Although I understand the logic of this - given the establishment of Muji on Tottenham Court Road, offering consumers the choice between shopping for minimalist Japanese consumer goods on perpendicular to a west-east axis and doing exactly the same perpendicular to a north-south axis does seem a choice too far. Nonetheless, did we really need another purveyor of strappy tops to a grateful nation?
Sorry, no idea what I was thinking when I typed that. Of course we do.
Also, a McDonalds, which surprised me as it seemed to have a different branding approach to the others (I’ve been thinking a lot about marketing recently; forgive me). Possibly merely as a result of London’s archaic laws regarding not painting over the 19th century marble, the letters are in their traditional yellow, but on a white background, making them seem unobtrusive and neurasthenic against the pus-in-a-wound glare of the traditional yellow on red. Which unpleasant image reminded me in turn of this article on McDonalds’ new healthy range.
There will be a brief pause while I gather my outrage. I realise that, as a westerner who takes a train to work, uses a computer, sits in an office that manages with remarkable style to be simultaneously centrally heated and air conditioned, I am so part of the problem. Nonetheless, there is something astonishing yet about the sheer venality of fast food. Slabs of pure energy, prepared in factories, larded with chemicals, portered globally in refrigerated transports and wrapped in layer after layer of waxed, plasticised paper, it’s like watching a man smashing another in the knee with a hockey stick just to watch him fall down. Ah well.
Anyway, healthy eating, a fairly laughable phrase it seems – it isn’t that McDonalds is unhealthy, although I have no doubt that that much sodium can’t be good. It is that there is too much of it, pre-pulped to slide down the meaty maw of its consumers more easily (hold a fast food hamburger in your mouth and wait for it to disintegrate. It’s practically predigested. It reminds me of the turkey-weight of Thanksgiving – a bloated celebration of the power to devour). So, although reducing the salt or fat content is good, presumably not filling people with beef is better. Not much of a business model, mind.
However, what really did for me was the new, healthier chicken nuggets (never eat any part of an animal that doesn’t exist, say I). These are white meat, as opposed to a processed mix of white and dark meat, like the old nuggets. For fuck’s sake. Why would one compact white and dark meat into a single blob in the first place? It goes against nature. Which perhaps answers the question. McDonald’s is the worst combination of science and eating you can get without actually eating Heinz Wolff.
On a more cultured note, is this the best recipe for tartare sauce ever?
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