The Big Mac

You don’t think about where it came from. You’re drunk or hungry or both, it’s late, you’re at McDonald’s because nowhere else is open and you need something in your mouth. The Big Mac tastes like every Big Mac ever—the bun somehow soft and stale at once, the meat thin and salty, the lettuce doing basically nothing, the sauce too sweet. It’s not really food. It’s the shape hunger takes when there are no better options. You eat it without considering who invented it, without considering much of anything.

Michael Jim Delligatti invented it. A McDonald’s franchise owner in Pennsylvania, sometime in the ’60s, and he decided the menu needed an upgrade. Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun—the jingle came later, everyone learned it, and now it’s sold in roughly ninety countries, billions and billions of them, but Jim never made real money. He got a plaque. That’s the punchline nobody tells—the guy who created one of the most consumed items on Earth got a plaque and not much else.

It’s become so universal that everyone has a Big Mac memory. Even people who avoid McDonald’s on principle, who’ve spent their lives opting out, will remember a time—usually young, usually late, usually with people they liked—when they ate one anyway. The Big Mac is boring enough and common enough that it registers as almost transparent. You don’t think of it as a created thing, an invention. It just exists, like streets or air.

But Jim created it. And then he died, recently, at 98. There’s an arithmetic to that. You invent something that becomes massive and faceless and profitable for everyone but you, and your name evaporates. The Big Mac is bigger than Jim now. The Big Mac will outlast everyone alive to read this. Billions of people have eaten what he made without knowing his name, without thinking about him for a second. That’s what stuck with me when I heard he was gone. Not sadness, exactly. Just the shape of it. He lived a whole life, built this thing that still feeds people, and mostly nobody knows. I wonder if he was okay with that by the end.