Its rear location – and the winding, curving driveway to approach it – is an irony of this
drive thru, I think. After all, what the drive thru is all about is cutting corners.  The name
“drive thru” itself has cut some corners, trimming that cumbersome “o” and “gh.” But 
the idea is broader.  McDonald’s is dedicated to circumventing the social formality of
dinner. It requires people in either a frantic hurry or a fit of laziness to combine eating 
and driving to save time. Why else would we be interested in a meal that can be ordered, 
made, and eaten while you sit behind a steering wheel? No Victorian pomp for us when
it comes to mealtime – we’ll rush it, box it, mass produce it, and wolf it down. Fast food. 

In my search to find what it is about McDonald’s that makes it a metaphor for American
culture, this idea of cutting corners keeps coming back to me. I wonder if Eric Schlosser
would agree; he just wrote a book called Fast Food Nation. Fast food. What a concept. 
Never, before Ray Kroc’s hamburger stand, had human civilization had the slightest 
interest in combining speed and food. Only in America, a fast food nation. 

I wonder if this occurs to the hefty woman who glares at me from the cockpit of her
SUV while she waits for her fries. I am inside, having bucked the drive thru trend, and
observe her from my place in line as she idles by the pick-up window. She grabs her 
bag and zooms off, and my attention darts back to the counter.

Since I am the only person in line, I deduce I am “who’s next,” and nod to the 
thoroughly made-up Hispanic woman with the bumpy English and wounded syntax.
As I found out last summer, working in a deli with a counter as wide as this one,
“who’s next” can in fact be difficult to determine and thus necessary to ask. 
But now, standing here by myself, I take it to be one of the annoying catchphrases 
of inane server-speak.

The same goes for the woman’s inquiry of where I will eat. “For here or to go?”
“For here,” I utter awkwardly. I’m taking an English course right now with the 
kind of professor who shudders at such grievances as mistaking “affect” and 
“effect,” and I vow never to tell him how I just constructed such a painful 
prepositional phrase – “for here.” In a nation of cutting corners, and in this, 
its unofficial restaurant, even grammar is deep-fried in impatience.

I glance down at the screen on the register, searching for my total. Instead, it 
flashes, like a stock quote on a Times Square ticker: “Avg serve time 47 sec.” 
My solitude in line notwithstanding, my Big Mac Extra Value Meal clocks in 
at 3 minutes, 15 seconds. How this could ever balance out for an “avg” end 
up at “47 sec,” especially when other people are around to place orders of 
their own, I can’t speculate. I receive my food from my now wordless receptionist, 
assuring myself that the deviation in “serve time” has something to do with the
“extra value.”

The ketchup dispensers are empty, and soon my hostess appears with an 
armful of ketchup bags looking like donations from a local blood bank. Whatever 
dent this analogy threatens to gouge in my appetite will not prevent me from 
eagerly devouring my Big Mac, however, since it is now mid-afternoon and I’ve 
only had a bagel for breakfast. A big burger’s reply to stomach growls is one of 
life’s purest pleasures – right up there with a swig of cool water after a run and
crawling into bed after a bone-wearying afternoon in a museum with long halls. 

To hear my box of French fries tell it, my satisfaction is rivaled by the woman 
with ketchup bags under her arms, though her blank face does nothing to support 
the notion. But that’s what it says, right on the box: “We Love To See You Smile.” 
I first heard this on a TV ad and found it very odd, since it was a claim I’ve never 
heard from anyone except a lover. Now I find it on my fry box alongside a revised 
McDonald’s logo: an upside-down arc underscoring the golden arches – a smile
that makes the arches look like severely raised eyebrows. Cute. 

As I munch, free, finally, from the stare-pierced pressure of being “who’s next,” 
I am liberated to survey the front counter from my perch at an adjacent table. 
A McDonald’s counter is an exciting place – an explosion of color and brightness, 
a carnival of amusement machines and displays. I remember being frightened of it 
as a kid – approaching the counter was on par, reverence-wise, with going to the 
front of church. Back then, I would turn and mumble my order to one of my parents 
and they would pass it along. I still see religious parallels in the fronts of churches
and fast food places, given their identical mandate to nourish our deepest hungers, 
but now, safely behind the line waiting area, I examine it confidently.

The menu boards haven’t changed much – they’re still plain with straight rows and, 
like scoreboards at softball games, announce their prices with manually replaced 
number rectangles. The rest of it is almost sci-fi, what with all the strange shiny 
silver machines that dispense milkshakes, soda, ice cream, and cappuccino, along 
with the McFlurry machine that buzzes as it spits out M&M’s. Cups stick out of the
wall like guns on a battleship. Computer monitors flash, eyed by workers as they 
snatch burgers from under heat lamps. 

It looks like the innards of a starship. It would, anyway, were it not blanketed in 
bursts of sale signs, bright and clean and gushingly heralding, “Don’t Forget Dessert!
New Shamrock Shake For Good Luck,” or “How Sweet It Is! Iced Cinnamon Rolls.” 
The giddy tone remains even for announcements as unremarkable as: “Now Serving Caffeine-Free Diet Coke!”

However unusual I may consider such orgasmic expressions of ecstasy about food, 
that book by Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation, excerpted recently in the Atlantic 
Monthly, illumines the situation. Schlosser did some looking into where fries come 
from (what this man typically does with his day, I am ill-equipped to address). He 
found that, unlike its hamburger-stand days when all fries came from fresh potatoes 
on site, the McDonald’s chain now imports thousands of pounds of frozen fries, and 
depends on what the official recipe cryptically calls “natural flavor” for their unmistakable 
taste. The flavor is produced in New Jersey at International Flavors & Fragrances, the 
same manufacturer of the artificial fragrance of Calvin Klein’s Eternity. I thought to 
myself that it must be a very lucrative endeavor to embark on more efficiently satiating 
the two main urges of human beings – hunger and sex. Gradually the exclamatory 
menu boards make more sense to me.                                              NEXT>