Think About It: Eating Green at Big Red's
The fast food wars continue apace this week, my friends, as I learned on a quest to Wendy’s on my way home from Thibodaux one night. Planning only to indulge myself in something as pedestrian as chicken nuggets, I instead found myself staring at a menu offering something all-new: “Frescata Sandwiches.”
“Frescata” is a Greek word, which means “cold cuts that cost far more, per square inch, than you would pay for them at Subway.” There were four such sandwiches presenting themselves to me - a club, ham and Swiss, turkey and Swiss and turkey with “Basil Pesto.” I didn’t have the slightest clue what “Basil Pesto” was, and in fact, strongly suspected that my doctor once gave me an antibiotic for it. But I decided to try out the Frescata Club using a highly scientific and elaborate selection process: it was the one with bacon on it.
The sandwich, I’m glad to report, actually tasted pretty good, and as the combo included “baked” potato chips and a bottle of water, I at least get to pretend it’s healthier than a triple cheeseburger and fries. Which also tastes pretty good, but I gave up hamburgers for Lent, so I’ll thank you to stop mentioning them, because if my mouth keeps watering while I write this I’m going to need a new keyboard.
The real question, when you get right down to it, is whether or not any of these sandwiches will still be available a year from now. Or six months from now. Or Tuesday. There’s a notoriously short menu-life for unusual offerings on fast-food menus, after all, and that menu life gets even shorter when the food in question purports to be healthy. For all our obsession in this society with image and appearance, we’d still much rather scarf down greasy pizza with something fried on it than anything green.
I’m the same way. I can’t stand, for instance, broccoli, but the list of things I like on pizza seems to get longer with every slice I eat. I’d like to eat healthier, but every food that I can legitimately label as healthy has a flavor that I compare unfavorably to the bottom of my shoe. And when I do find something that I even think is healthy, it tends to go away.
A few years ago, for instance, Burger King offered a variety of chicken baguette sandwiches that they famously advertised as having only five grams of fat. Five grams of fat are nothing. The average American can pick five grams of fat out of their teeth after a single serving of Oreos and milk. So I began to consume these sandwiches religiously. Of course, they discontinued the product.
So now that I have discovered that I enjoy the Frescata sandwiches, you’d better rush out and try them because their live span has just become extraordinarily limited. I blame myself, actually. I have always maintained that the way to make people eat healthier food is to develop healthier food that tastes like Big Macs and Baja Chalupas. If this were to happen, I would live virtually forever, and I have to believe that most people are the same way. But then something relatively healthy comes out that I do like, it goes away long before I’m ready to say good-bye. Since, as I’ve already established, most people will eat healthy food if it tasted good, I have to believe that I’m the problem. Fortunately, this satisfies both my narcissistic and my neurotic tendencies, which my inevitable therapist will appreciate someday.
Now this only happens with healthy foods that I like. The unhealthy stuff plods along unabated. Bacon cheeseburger pizzas are plentiful. Fried chicken is far from an endangered species. And despite repeated attempts to cripple it, the McRib rises from the ashes every few years like a cholesterol-laden Phoenix, ready to sweep down with her power of heartburn to set my colon aflame.
The logical conclusion here, of course, is that the Evil Alien Overlords, those who exist in near-Earth orbit with the stated purpose of making sure that my life remains as comically amusing as possible, want me to continue eating unhealthy stuff. Burgers and fries and shakes and tacos and quesadillas and ice cream and cakes and cookies and I really need to stop this sentence before I go too far and mention (dear God) lasagna.
Other conclusions could be that people who go to Wendy’s and Burger King actually want - shock of shocks -- hamburgers, and that the health food probably just isn’t going to fly there. And not all the efforts of health lobbyists is ever going to change that. In a town in California a few years ago, the city council required fast food joints to offer vegetarian hamburgers on their menu, then the people who demanded the health food never walked into the restaurants or spent a dime, and they spiraled out of business.
I hope the Frescata sandwiches last a while. I hope other fast food joints find ways to offer tasty, healthy alternatives on their menu. But I also know that no matter how many low-fat sandwiches and entrée salads they offer up, I’m still going to order a burger once in a while. And so will you, admit it.
Maybe if I get them to add more lettuce.
Blake M. Petit knows he should eat healthier, dammmit. Shut up. Contact him with comments, suggestions or a recipe for a great Strawberry Chicken Salad at BlakePT@cox.net, visit him on the web at Evertime Realms and view the Evertime Realms Livejournal, blakemp
“Frescata” is a Greek word, which means “cold cuts that cost far more, per square inch, than you would pay for them at Subway.” There were four such sandwiches presenting themselves to me - a club, ham and Swiss, turkey and Swiss and turkey with “Basil Pesto.” I didn’t have the slightest clue what “Basil Pesto” was, and in fact, strongly suspected that my doctor once gave me an antibiotic for it. But I decided to try out the Frescata Club using a highly scientific and elaborate selection process: it was the one with bacon on it.
The sandwich, I’m glad to report, actually tasted pretty good, and as the combo included “baked” potato chips and a bottle of water, I at least get to pretend it’s healthier than a triple cheeseburger and fries. Which also tastes pretty good, but I gave up hamburgers for Lent, so I’ll thank you to stop mentioning them, because if my mouth keeps watering while I write this I’m going to need a new keyboard.
The real question, when you get right down to it, is whether or not any of these sandwiches will still be available a year from now. Or six months from now. Or Tuesday. There’s a notoriously short menu-life for unusual offerings on fast-food menus, after all, and that menu life gets even shorter when the food in question purports to be healthy. For all our obsession in this society with image and appearance, we’d still much rather scarf down greasy pizza with something fried on it than anything green.
I’m the same way. I can’t stand, for instance, broccoli, but the list of things I like on pizza seems to get longer with every slice I eat. I’d like to eat healthier, but every food that I can legitimately label as healthy has a flavor that I compare unfavorably to the bottom of my shoe. And when I do find something that I even think is healthy, it tends to go away.
A few years ago, for instance, Burger King offered a variety of chicken baguette sandwiches that they famously advertised as having only five grams of fat. Five grams of fat are nothing. The average American can pick five grams of fat out of their teeth after a single serving of Oreos and milk. So I began to consume these sandwiches religiously. Of course, they discontinued the product.
So now that I have discovered that I enjoy the Frescata sandwiches, you’d better rush out and try them because their live span has just become extraordinarily limited. I blame myself, actually. I have always maintained that the way to make people eat healthier food is to develop healthier food that tastes like Big Macs and Baja Chalupas. If this were to happen, I would live virtually forever, and I have to believe that most people are the same way. But then something relatively healthy comes out that I do like, it goes away long before I’m ready to say good-bye. Since, as I’ve already established, most people will eat healthy food if it tasted good, I have to believe that I’m the problem. Fortunately, this satisfies both my narcissistic and my neurotic tendencies, which my inevitable therapist will appreciate someday.
Now this only happens with healthy foods that I like. The unhealthy stuff plods along unabated. Bacon cheeseburger pizzas are plentiful. Fried chicken is far from an endangered species. And despite repeated attempts to cripple it, the McRib rises from the ashes every few years like a cholesterol-laden Phoenix, ready to sweep down with her power of heartburn to set my colon aflame.
The logical conclusion here, of course, is that the Evil Alien Overlords, those who exist in near-Earth orbit with the stated purpose of making sure that my life remains as comically amusing as possible, want me to continue eating unhealthy stuff. Burgers and fries and shakes and tacos and quesadillas and ice cream and cakes and cookies and I really need to stop this sentence before I go too far and mention (dear God) lasagna.
Other conclusions could be that people who go to Wendy’s and Burger King actually want - shock of shocks -- hamburgers, and that the health food probably just isn’t going to fly there. And not all the efforts of health lobbyists is ever going to change that. In a town in California a few years ago, the city council required fast food joints to offer vegetarian hamburgers on their menu, then the people who demanded the health food never walked into the restaurants or spent a dime, and they spiraled out of business.
I hope the Frescata sandwiches last a while. I hope other fast food joints find ways to offer tasty, healthy alternatives on their menu. But I also know that no matter how many low-fat sandwiches and entrée salads they offer up, I’m still going to order a burger once in a while. And so will you, admit it.
Maybe if I get them to add more lettuce.
Blake M. Petit knows he should eat healthier, dammmit. Shut up. Contact him with comments, suggestions or a recipe for a great Strawberry Chicken Salad at BlakePT@cox.net, visit him on the web at Evertime Realms and view the Evertime Realms Livejournal, blakemp