RESTAURANTS
Deborah Ross
GOLLY, I love this time of year, don't you? First, Hallowe'en, the marvellous pagan festi- val of Turning Off All The Lights And Pre- tending You Are Not In, then Bonfire Night, with its hateful big bangs and all, this year, on top of another looming petrol crisis — I rushed to the garage with an empty tank as soon as I heard and had to queue for bloody ages in this long line of stupid panic-buyers. I was furious! — plus half-term. Half-term! Half-term is absolutely horrible because if you don't plan sufficiently (i.e. send your children to boardmg-school, then move quickly to Peru), you have to, like, look after them yourself. Spooky or what? I did try an au pair once, yes, but she spoke funny and cried a lot, particularly when I put a lock on the phone and banned her from the Tropi- cana. Honestly, you have the decency to res- cue these people from their terrible, war-torn little dumps, and they head straight for the Tropicana. You'd think they'd be grateful for just the odd glass of uncontaminated tap water — wouldn't you? — but, oh no, they want it all. Ours even wanted her own key! Is that taking the piss or what?
Now, where is all this heading this week? Well, as it happens, I do have a theme, which I've been cleverly warming up to. And, yes, it is children. Well, children and food. This is something I started thinking about when I caught those ads for the pasta sauce with 'hidden vegetables' in M&S's new children's food range. Hidden vegeta- bles? I was minded to try some just to see if 1 could find, say, a pea, in dark glasses and false nose, sitting on a park bench behind a copy of the Times, so I could pluck it out and shout, You are useless at hiding. How did you ever graduate from hiding-school?' Still, it made me think about the whole, mostly breadcrumbed, and often dinosaur- shaped, entirely separate children's food culture that seems to have sprung up in recent years. When I was a child, we ate largely what my parents ate, and could like it or lump it. My mother says the difference between her generation and our generation is that she said to her children, 'Supper is ready', whereas we say, `So what do you want for supper then, darling?' Which is why, she argues, 'Children are all so hideously fussy nowadays.'
Actually, my own son (eight) isn't too hideously fussy. He will cat pretty much anything. I think this is because I am such a crap housewife that when I tell him he has to eat up because there isn't anything else, he knows it is true. Of course, he has had his moments. For a number of years he waged a campaign against `bits'. You know: `This juice has got bits in'-and 'This yoghurt has got hits in.' No, darling. It's just pieces of fruit and you like fruit, don't you? 'It's bits and I hate bits.' He once declared, too, that the only meat he would eat was chick- en, which was fine because I quickly discov- ered that a lot of children's food phobias actually reside not in the food itself but in the naming of it. So we'd have pork. 'What's this?' Chicken. 'Oh, good.' And we'd have lamb. 'What's this?' Chicken. 'Oh, good.' And we'd have cod. 'What's this?' Chicken. `It's very soft chicken.' That's because it's organic, free-range, had its own room and telly and everything, spent a lot of time sit- ting in an armchair, got soft. 'Oh, good.'
Anyway, there we were, hanging about during half-term, with not much to do between the live Paralympics coverage, and the highlights later — yes, my son loved it, although he would keep shouting, '11,40m, MUM. COME AND LOOK AT THIS SWIMMER. HE'S GOT NO LEGS', and, 'How DOES SHE DO THAT WITH NO ARMS?' — when I suddenly had a McDonald's moment. This is some- thing I get every five years or so, when only a McDonald's will do. I know we're all meant to hate McDonald's, with its increasing glob- al domination and Disney tie-ins — have you seen Dinosaur, by the way? It's so boring I thought my watch had stopped — but, when I get one of these moments, there is just no way out of it. So I offer to take my son, and his friend who is hanging out with us, thinking they'd be thrilled because all children love McDonald's, don't they? Chil- dren and McDonald's go together like, I don't know, um . . . six teenagers with one false nose between them standing on your doorstep, demanding a quid each and . . Hallowe'en? Yes. But the boys were not enthusiastic. hate McDonald's,' said my son. 'And it always makes me sick,' added my son's friend. Oh, please, I begged. 'No,' they said. Pleasy weasy lemon squeezy? 'No,' they said. Chinese burns until you say, '1 love Barbie'? `OK,' they said.
We went to our nearest McDonald's, which also has a Drive Thru and a Walk Thru but not a One-Legged-Hurdler Thru, which I think is both a shame and revolting- ly discriminatory. 1 don't know; is it just me or has McDonald's changed from quite a cheerful, £1.99 Happy Meal sort of place to somewhere quite depressing? Perhaps it's just the light but the other diners — a large- ly shell-suited lot and, surprisingly, childless in most instances — did look very white and ghostly and ill. The girl on the till took our order. She wasn't that thick. She even got it right the third time. There was no 'May I take your order?' or 'Have a nice day', though. That all seems to have gone. You just get a kind of sad grunting these days. I ordered a Big Mac. A Big Mac (I now know because I later asked McDonald's to pro- vide me with a nutritional breakdown) is made out of: 1) Beef patties: 100 per cent pure beef with no additives, fillers, binders or flavour enhancers. 2) Bun: flour, water, sugar, sesame seeds, yeast, soya-bean oil, salt, mono- and di-acetyltartaric acid esters of mono- and di-glycerides of fatty acids, ascorbic acid, calcium propionate. 3) Big Mac sauce: water, soya-bean oil, sugar, spir- it vinegar, modified corn starch, egg yolk, spices, high fructose corn syrup, salt, xan- than gum, potassium sorbate, spice extracts. 4) Processed cheese slice: Cheddar cheese, water, butter, milk protein, natural cheese flavouring, tri-sodium phosphate, veta-apo- 8,-carotenal. . . .
Well, all I can say is, thank God the meat has no additives, fillers, binders or flavour enhancers or this stuff would be worryingly rubbish for you. My son ordered a Quarter Pounder while his friend went for a Triple Deckus, whatever that is. We all had french fries, which were good, hot and salty. We sit on plastic chairs round a little plastic table. A Far-Eastern-looking employee mops around our feet. Swish, swish, swish. My son says he can't eat his burger. 'It's too disgust- ing. It's for someone with no teeth.' My son's friend says, proudly, 'I ate mine, even though it made me feel sick.' My Big Mac was limp and rather yucky. Have they always been limp and yucky? Or have my tastes changed over the years? I had a coffee, which was fine. I like the warning on the side of the cup: 'Caution: contents hot'. The one thing you could never accuse McDonald's of is overestimating their clientele.
We go home, all feeling slightly nau- seous, to watch a bit of one-armed discus- throwing. Then, my son's friend's mother calls the next morning to say the Triple Deckus made her son very Sickus indeed, and that he'd McVomited quite excessively during the night. She added that this wouldn't have been so bad 'but he sleeps in the top bunk now. His little brother wasn't best pleased.' Yes, I think I've got over my McDonald's moment for the next five years.
McDonald's, everywhere, unless a branch of Gap got in first.
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