How Grand is the “Grand Mac”?

Take that, The Mainstream Media!

            When some people want to get effed up and have a regrettable time, they drink. When I get the same feeling, I seek out certain disreputable types of food—fallen foods, foods that have been divorced and then have remarried, the foods that loiter and smoke in conspicuous places and do not care that they’re not supposed to be there. The one dollar French bread pizzas and hotdogs, the forty-cent burritos, your assorted fast food-eries. I don’t reach for a bag of something illegal and my credit card; I go to Burger King. Or McDonald’s. This is a piece about McDonald’s and about their new Grand Mac and about whether it finally makes eating their burgers a comparable experience to going to, say, Hardee’s instead. What I mean by this is that I’ve never really enjoyed McDonald’s burgers from a value-for-your-dollar sort of angle apart from that brief stint where they had the Deluxe Quarter Pounder on the menu. The Deluxe Quarter Pounder was the closest McDonald’s, in my memory, has come to having some form of the Everyburger. You know it—your standard beef, cheese, tomato, pickle, onion, and lettuce deal that basically every other burger place has on its menu. When McDonald’s had the Deluxe Quarter Pounder, I got it exclusively when I went there to eat. It had all your standard burger toppings and was also bigger than their usual fare. Ultimately, the toppings are important, but size has been the problem. I like the taste of the regular Big Mac just fine, in fact, but I’ve never eaten one—as a part of a combo even—without feeling somewhat dissatisfied afterward, like I wanted more. But since I’m not a hedonist, I’m not going back for another burger; I’m going home thinking about how I should have eaten at Burger King instead even though I like McDonald’s fries better. (They are delicious stale. I love stale fries, from everywhere. I’m just an overcoat filled with raccoons, I swear. Quit stepping on my nose, Bob! Chitter chitter! Scritch scratch!) There is something very uniquely upsetting in this late-capitalist nightmare about wanting to spend your money on something and being held back from doing so for some reason.

            Enter the so-called Grand Mac. Like the Angry Whopper, this was a burger variant I’ve been magnetically drawn to, at least in part for the reasons mentioned above: that the prospect of A Big Mac But More makes me wonder if McDonald’s is finally going to give me my heart-clogging money’s worth in a single combo. I’ve been seeing ads on billboards around town, and I’ve even seen a few pictures of the G-Mac itself online; however, one question continued to nag me and make me at once both curious to try one myself and leery of getting burned. Everyone knows that fast food sandwich advertising is the equivalent of putting a glorious front door on a silo filled with manure. The ads present the most beautiful sandwich with the greenest lettuce and fluffiest bun, and you know that the actual thing is going to be squashed flat, with the fiber-y, white part of the lettuce leaf on it, and possibly the cheese so far so off-center that counting it as a part of the sandwich and not a side is generous. This isn’t a knock against the workers who prepare the food either. The simple truth of the matter is that advertising for any food product involves a little mendacity. We use glue instead of milk in cereal ads because milk isn’t actually white enough to look like milk. I’ve heard stories of lipstick on tomatoes to make the color pop more in advertising. The ideal sandwich—Sandwich Jesus, the Ubersandwich—doesn’t actually exist in a form we could (or would want) to consume. It’s a mirage. The real deal can’t measure up because the sandwich is just like us: the poor mortal cast in a mold that cracked irreparably when our heavenly counterparts sprang into being. The real sandwich behind the façade is us. We eat the sandwich to make peace with the fact that we will only ever be less than perfect. Less than perfect fare for less than perfect beings. We deserve one another. (Yes, Richard, we get that you went to seminary. Congratulations: You’re part of an ideological state apparatus.)

            Anyway. Looking at the promotional materials for the Grand Mac, I couldn’t quite tell what was so “grand” about it. How was it meant to be taller than the original Mac? The images and even product descriptions for the sandwich did not make this any clearer. There’s an extra slice of cheese on the bottom apparently, but the height differential between O-Mac and G-Mac is too large for the cheese alone to be the deciding factor.

            Maybe the patties are thicker? I thought, though, again, the images I was looking at didn’t suggest as much. I was starting think this was actually a painfully obvious trick. I’d been had by false promises of large sandwiches before. (We’re looking at you, Burger King’s Long Jalapeno Burger Thing with your actually small size so small that you weren’t actually any bigger than a regular burger somebody cut in half and then rearranged so that the thing was longer than it was wide.)

            The truth of the matter is that the presentation of the burger is the problem. McDonald’s ads kept stressing height, but as I mentioned before, height is ultimately a pointless quality to stress in the Urburger when your audience is well aware that the promise will be broken by the reality. The ads that I’ve seen try to pass the G-Mac off as taller than the O-Mac and the new Mac Jr. However, the height is actually comparable to that of an O-Mac on a good day (after the squashing). I noted this before I bought one when I was looking at photographs online. The reality is that the G-Mac is noticeably bigger than the O-Mac, but the ads stress the wrong dimension. The burger isn’t taller—It’s wider. I would say that the G-Mac is roughly the size of a Whopper, with the attendant wider patties the increased bunnage entails, and that’s a nice step up in size. After consuming the Mac and its fry brethren, I was pleased to find that I was experiencing the familiar somewhat queasy over-stuffed feeling I usually get after eating this stuff. This was after going some time without a meal, mind, and being in a mood to really Consume something.

 

As you can see here, height is clearly not the G-Mac's greatest strength.

            In terms of taste and quality, this is just more Mac we’re talking about here. Do you like Mac? If so, then you’ll like this Mac too. The one possible downside is that more surface area means more of that delicious Mac sauce, and said sauce has an admittedly strong sweet/tangy taste that might be a bit much depending on how much you get of it. This is a factor that might vary from McDonald’s to McDonald’s and from saucertizer to saucertizer. It wasn’t a huge deal, but I did think to myself that it might be possible to have too much of the sauce on the burger. On the other hand, the mere possibility of excess is a mark in the G-Mac’s favor when you consider my original dissatisfaction with the value I was getting in the O-Mac…

*The clarion call of someone tossing a fresh bag of garbage into a dumpster sounds in the dusk.*

            in conclusion tha g-marcis very good for….. if you loved Mcd’s but alays wantd morjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjkl;k;

Editor’s Note: I have just been informed that Ira M. Humanington is not actually a journalist but is instead a pack of raccoons hiding inside a trench coat. Mr. Humanington no longer writes for the site as of this time, and loyal patrons should disregard anything untoward he might have previously posed about either this country, its president, or the sweet, sweet taste of hot garbage. (We’re trying to remove it.) Please be advised that there may be more hungry raccoons attempting to pull the wool over the eyes of the citizens of America; therefore, if you encounter any journalists, you should assume that they are all actually a pack of raccoons disguised as a human being until the truth of the matter can be determined. I recommend packing your pockets full of raw, stinking garbage. If the journalist begins to disintegrate into a squirming pile of hungry raccoons, you can then throw them the garbage to buy you time to escape. May God have mercy on us all.