Peace & Love

One night, when I was young, my Father called me in to the TV room. I was probably on the computer or reading. It felt like it was a late evening, so it must have been a friday or similar. A sense of nothing to do. “Ben, come in here, you'll like this..” Dutifilly, I wandered in. Given that many times it had been something about Formula 1, someone I didn't know dying, but, we as children, obey. “What?” I said as I sat down. The screen showed a man in a suit and sunglasses in front of that church my folks had made me see last year. It was a better church than most. But not as good as the woods. “This guy is great, just listen to it, and watch it, you dont have to understand it, I don't always, but he's ace”.

And so I slowly, uncertainly, tentatively, fell in love with Jonathan Meades, and it is always in these places, I feel him most.

His disdain for fast food is well known, but what can we learn from these places, these modules placed from a SimCity planner on the outskirts of a town, near a motorway, a motorway tributry and the most essential of all, the retail park and it's attendent and necessary car park?

The server arrives with my tray of food; I always do table service. It feels like a glorious treat. It is not. By using the app, often I order ahead of time. I live down on the River Lee, and McDonald's is one of the most convenient and I suppose consistent meals I can afford. Frequently, it gives me the opportunity to do multiple things – check my email, charge my phone, have what I call a 'posh poo'. I always use the app to make sure I gather the points. The number of times the points have saved me are too many to count.

And yet, there's just over my shoulder is Jonathan Meades scrutinizing me, my decisions. Where does this place, place me? What does it mean that I even accept this architecture? This structure all it communicates? I feel like he's urging me to burn it down, to use the very wrapper to stuff into some form of Molotov cocktail to throw on the floor to scream, “Damn you, damn you all to hell! Why don't we have proper food anymore that people can afford?” Either way, I continue unwrapping my cheeseburger.

My order is relatively, always, almost the same – one cheeseburger, one quarter pounder with cheese. It's essential to get the quarter pounder with cheese (this is and I speak from experience as a McDonald's boy; I worked there for a couple of summers). The quarter pounder is frequently underordered which means it always has to be cooked fresh. You always have to wait just that little bit longer, and it's always just a little bit extra beautiful. I strongly recommend this. I start though with a cheeseburger – simplicity refined. It's almost like an platonic ideal of a cheeseburger – it never varies, it never changes. It's designed to be devoured immediately. I do. It's not good. But it is, uniquely, it. It is the qualia of “cheeseburger”. It is what we say when we mean cheeseburger. It maybe the nadir, but it is still a cheeseburger. A motherfucking cheeseburger.

Once the McDonald's molecules have coated my mouth, and I feel like I'm happily back in that land, the mcdonalds entitities have come to play, they're asking me to play in that savory-but-sweet that sticky mouth land that only Ronald McWonka can create. The oompha loopahs in their strange outfits and hairnets. The meat-not-meat of their lower tier burgers means is it necessary , no essential, now to have a mouthful of chips. Perhaps handful is more correct, but I have optimised for mouth. Sue me.

It's only recently that I have learned to love ketchup; I always found it too sweet in my early years, but now I relish – it that a pun? – the stuff and throw it over microwave rice with eggs and carefree abandon in the same way I do with things like kimchi and sriracha. Like we all do. The world has certainly become a saucier place.

But I digress. Once we've had the crispy potato starch goodness – though still I missed the beef tallow dunked originals. We're ready to chow down on the Quarter Pounder with Cheese.

The Quarter Pounder Cheese in McDonald's may be the best most readily accessible burger that you can always rely on within the confines of the UK. Indeed, that is a lot of parameters that I am applying – I'll agree they're almost caveats at this point. But I'd struggle for you to challenge me that that is not true.

If you don't believe me, let me take you on a tour of the beautiful flourescent liminal spaces – these third spaces, these weird and strange architectural non-entities that create non-food meals that can still delight, inspire, bring people together, and make families happy.

In a world where maybe these spaces seem less and less affordable, ergo available, and welcoming, maybe there's something to be said for these strange temples to the idea of food and mealtimes. Maybe it isn't just fast food anymore; it's a fast life, a fast thought. This food in itself – its architecture, its temporality, its impermanence, its immediacy – is an indicator of the global prices index. The Big Mac Index goes both ways.

As I watch a boy delightedly eating his Happy Meal with his dad – a regular visit we hope in both directions – I wondered if we deserve McDonald's or does McDonald's deserve us? The happy feet of the child mirror mine after a day of boat chores and rain. Grateful to be warm, grateful to be fed. Happy to be alive. Does it really matter what the food is sometimes?

Perhaps it really is the sign/signifier/manifestation/capitalist entity/ of what we have become. Fast thoughts, quick thoughts, quick food, quick fucks, quick jobs, quick dopamine hits, quick buildings, quick exits, quick returns, quick profits, quick wins.

With that, Jonathan Meades takes a chip of my tray and winks, like my father still does and I return to crunch up the wrapper, placing it on my tray. Looking out onto the neon-lit reality that shines into the car park on the edges of the M25. The siren screams past. The UberEats chums settle, perch, alight and return. The L-plated scooters, phone mounts, hand muffs, and box bins, branded square rucksacks and thermals are easy to spot – these carrions of take out, of the fast food neon-lit car parks gods, as I cry screaming about the hellholes we've created.

I take my tray and I empty it into the bin. I place my tray on top of the bin. I turn, walk out, and say thank you to no one because there is no one to thank.

As I walk along the towpath amongst the pipistrelles feeding on the newly bloomed and blossomed insects, I wonder what it's all about.

2/10 for food 9/10 for Necessity