He Got a Plaque

Two beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun. Fifty years in and that sequence still lives somewhere in the brain stem, permanent and unkillable.

Jim Delligatti invented the Big Mac in 1967. He ran a McDonald’s franchise in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, wanted to give his customers something more substantial than the standard menu, pitched the idea to corporate, met resistance, eventually got the green light, and watched his creation become probably the most recognized food item on earth. What did he get for it? All I got was a plaque, he told The Independent once, with what I imagine was a very particular expression on his face.

He died in November 2016, age ninety-eight, surrounded by family. Ninety-eight is a good run. The Big Mac is approaching sixty and showing no signs of mortality.

I don’t eat them with the frequency I did in my twenties, when a post-midnight McDonald’s stop was practically a ritual—stumbling in after whatever the night had been, the fluorescent light a kind of brutal punctuation mark, the vaguely unhinged architecture of the thing in your hand. But even now, knowing what I know about the industrial food system and the math of factory beef, there’s something about holding a Big Mac that lands differently than it should. The weight of it. The absurdity of it. Jim knew exactly what he was doing, and he got a plaque, and he lived to ninety-eight, which maybe isn’t the worst outcome after all.