McDonald's Musing....

My beautiful sisters!

The other day we got McDonalds for supper. It has been literally months since we have done that. I am not adverse to fast food per se--fried chicken in any form (nuggets, strips etc) is one of my favorite things! And french fries!

However, something was very odd. Because we had been eating at home for so long, and because any eating out I have done has been either a local take out pizza place or an occasional meal at Chili's, my taste buds must have been used to home cooking.

The first thing that I noticed is that the food tasted odd. I am not saying it tasted different, I am saying it tasted ODD. Now, again, I am not a food snob--I LOVE fast food, though for cost it is just too pricey. However, honestly, the food tasted fake. I remember thinking "this tastes like it is food and then something else added to it.....something NOT food.". It was not that I was tasting different spices or seasonings. It was actually like eating food mixed with crayon or something. There was something out of place. Like eating food off of a soapy dish, or licking your fingers if you had used hand sanitizer or bug spray. Just that taste where you know that something is not food.

It did not taste BAD at all--in fact, I would have loved some more!! It just tasted....fake.


Then almost immediately after supper that night, my tummy got very full of air--so much so that it was visible (ok, even more so than usual! lol). It did not bother me much, but was just annoying. I took some gas tablets and everything got back to normal.

But I talked to TWS later and found that he found the taste was "fake" too. BUT he had eaten a chicken sandwich, not the nuggets. Again, neither of us are health food nuts in the least....in fact, there was a time of my life not too long ago where I thought poptarts should count as fruit (I was a big hit at the la leche league meetings lolol). so this is not "I am too good for McDonalds" but "Weird, wonder how long that has been going on and why I did not notice it before what exactly *AM* I tasting? Is it bad for me?".

As for the air bubbles in the tummy, I do not know about that either. TWS used to get indigestion when he ate burgers at Mc D's but never chicken. I am not allergic to much, and we eat fried foods quite often. In fact, fried tastybird chicken tenders and ore ida tater tots that I had had a few days before neither tasted fake nor inflated me like a balloon. So it is not that my eating habits are just SO healthy that my delicate system was not used to fried foods....we are from the south, we deep fry as much as we can!

This concerns me. Not the air bubbles, that could have been from hormones or whatever, but the fact that I could actually taste something that was not food. I wonder what it was, I wonder where they make their breading for their food, i wonder where they get the chicken and potatoes. I know that they, as well as most other food vendors or companies, use a company that makes fake food tastes. I read a VERY interesting article about it. They can make a million different tastes and smells from chemicals. I am not saying that the chemicals are all harmful, though I have no idea what they are. I am just saying that we might want to be careful about how much non-food items we eat.

I mean, surely it is not too much to ask that, when you buy food, that ALL the food is ACTUALLY food.

This also possibly answers why many kids only want fast food, no matter what sort of good homemade food you make. My fried chicken will never taste like fried chicken from places that do not use regular, actual food ingredients (I can even buy MSG, but I cannot buy the chemical flavorings that have been invented). It gives me pause to think about that.

Anyway, this is neither here nor there. Just thought it was so interesting, seeing as how I actually love chicken nuggets BUT after many months away from them, could very clearly taste something that seemed fake AND had tummy troubles as well.