Mickey D-land
No offense is intended toward overweight people or the employees of McDonald’s restaurants. Toward the dietitians and portion planners of that company, yes.
Where The Buffalo Roamed
By Stephen Von Worley • September 22nd, 2009
Published by the blogger: http://www.weathersealed.com/
This summer, cruising down the I-5 through California’s Central Valley to the Los Angeles Basin, I unwittingly stumbled upon a most exasperating development: the country strip mall. First, let me state that I don’t hate. I’ve got nothing against Petco, Starbucks, OfficeMax, et al. When overcome by the desire for a cubic yard of kitty litter, a carafe of pre-Columbian frappasmoochino, or fifty gross of pink highlighter pens, I’m there in a jiffy!
But, Mr. Real Estate Tycoon, did you have to plop your shopping center smack dab in the middle of what was previously nowhere? Okay, the land was cheap. And yes, you did traffic studies and proved that the interstate and distant suburbs would drench whatever you built in a raging torrent of eager consumerism. But your retail monstrosity drains the wildness from the countryside for twenty miles in every direction! Sure, you can’t see it from everywhere – but once you know it’s there, you feel it. In the rural drawl of a neighboring rancher, that flat-out sucks!
Hi girls and boys! It’s Ronald. I’m your big friend! See how big my ass is?
Which begs the question: just how far away can you get from our world of generic convenience? And how would you figure that out?
As I hurtled down the highway, a pair of golden arches crept over the horizon, and the proverbial lightbulb smacked me in the forehead. To gauge the creep of cookie-cutter commercialism, there’s no better barometer than McDonald’s – ubiquitous fast food chain and inaugural megacorporate colonizer of small towns nationwide.
So, I set out to determine the farthest point from a Micky Dee’s – in the lower 48 states, at least. This endeavor required information, and the nice folks at AggData were kind enough to provide it to me: a complete list of all 13,000-or-so U.S. restaurants, in CSV format, geolocated for maximum convenience. From there, a bit of software engineering gymnastics, and…
Behold, a visualization of the contiguous United States, colored by distance to the nearest domestic McDonald’s!
You can download a bigger, wallpaper-ready version of the visualization, too!
As expected, McDonald’s cluster at the population centers and hug the highway grid. East of the Mississippi, there’s wall-to-wall coverage, except for a handful of meager gaps centered on the Adirondacks, inland Maine, the Everglades, and outlying West Virginia.
For maximum McSparseness, we look westward, towards the deepest, darkest holes in our map: the barren deserts of central Nevada, the arid hills of southeastern Oregon, the rugged wilderness of Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains, and the conspicuous well of blackness on the high plains of northwestern South Dakota. There, in a patch of rolling grassland, loosely hemmed in by Bismarck, Dickinson, Pierre, and the greater Rapid City-Spearfish-Sturgis metropolitan area, we find our answer.
Between the tiny Dakotan hamlets of Meadow and Glad Valley lies the McFarthest Spot: 107 miles distant from the nearest McDonald’s, as the crow flies, and 145 miles by car!
Suffer a Big Mac Attack out there, and you’re hurtin’ for certain! For a coupla hours, at least, unless graced by the tender blessings of “manna from heaven” – that is, a fast food air drop from the Medi-Copter.
My comment: We all know that a diet of fat, sugar, salt and special sauce has been sought by mankind ever since the days when we had to hunt (literally) and sometimes even move our homes for our next meal. It seems humans are desirous of those elements because they help keep us warm in the winter, make us into soft couch shaped objects others can snuggle up with, and make us want iced high-fructose corn syrup in 32 ounce containers during the sweaty days of the year to sluff off all that salt.
At least those are the excuses we’ve been given by some of our enlightened and well-funded medical establishment. You desire Frito’s, Mountain Dew and ice cream because that’s what your ancestors dreamed of 10,000 years ago when they were freezing to death under the beautiful Northern Lights—something easy to grab in easy-open packages that was easily gulped down and that would feel like your empty space in the middle of your body had been filled with a bowling ball, not yet invented, OK, a caribou head. So you could sleep all night… feeling full. And, it only takes about an hour of labor (plus gas and drive time) to be able to get it, assuming you have a job at all.
Sorry, I don’t believe a word of those excuses. Why? Because it’s a fatso European/American idea promulgated by the people who want to sell unhealthy food to everybody for $2 to $6 each, three times a day, so that Mommy or, god forbid, Daddy doesn’t have to cook real food. Think about it: why are Asians or Indians or Africans not fat and why do they (almost) never think of eating at Mickey D’s or any of its many competitors? Because they haven’t been inundated with the TV commercials since they were first born and learned to sit up and watch the pretty pictures move. And their food is (mostly) meant to give them nutrition instead of pleasure and then sleep.
I know one thing. Taste is an acquired taste. (Think about it.) And some things that are designed in laboratories and corporate kitchens are addictive. So addictive that their dispensaries now must cover our very landscape (see map above).
What a success story, huh? It kinda makes you want a reasonable health care insurance bull, uh, bill to come out of Congress doesn’t it? You know, eat yourself sick and then spend thousands and thousands of dollars to get a diagnosis that says, “hey, you’re unhealthy. You need thousands more of pharmaceuticals, and uh, a change in lifestyle.”
Sugar, salt, fat, corn starch, ice cream— sure beats getting blown up in some faraway war, I guess. Same kind of misplaced patriotism, however. McDonald’s is where AMERICANS eat!
Our future. In a few years, they could be drafted for military service.
I think it has now been pretty well proven that the best diet (meaning WHAT you eat, not some weight-loss regimen) for most people in many parts of the world is what is called ‘the Mediterranean diet’. If you don’t know what food groups that consists of, you may go to ‘The Google’ now.
Oh yeah, and fancy, high-priced restaurants? Not so good. Their food tends to make one look thick. Just look at celebrities’ photos: when they were young and struggling and when they are rich and middle-aged— high-priced sauce-laden exotic meals make you thick. Check it out.
