It was not a great year for McDonald’s in 2004. The company was still recovering from a sales slump and management crisis when a comedian/political activist named Morgan Spurlock released a documentary (Super Size Me) in which he filmed himself consuming three McDonald’s meals a day for one month, thereby gaining 25 pounds and claiming to suffer from depression. Then, suddenly, 60-year-old McDonald’s CEO James Cantalupo died of a heart attack—leading to morbid merriment on the nanny-state left.
Which is why The Scrapbook takes some melancholy pleasure in noting the passing last week of Jim Delligatti, a McDonald’s franchise owner in Pennsylvania and inventor of the Big Mac. Of course, the Big Mac is not to everybody’s taste—or, at 540 calories apiece, the ideal meal on a daily basis. But even as the fast-food universe continues to expand, the 50-year-old Big Mac remains the best-known, and likely bestselling, fast-food sandwich in America, probably in the world. And the source of The Scrapbook’s “melancholy pleasure,” we hasten to add, is that Mr. Delligatti was a venerable 98 years old when he died.
His long life, in fact, is an object lesson on two fronts. First, as a franchise owner, he was quick to recognize that his customers wanted something the McDonald’s menu didn’t provide; and the McDonald’s Corporation—for all its vaunted uniformity and central control—was smart enough to embrace Delligatti’s innovation. And second, Delligatti faithfully consumed his invention for decades. But once a week or so, according to his son, and not three times a day, like Morgan Spurlock.
In The Scrapbook’s view, that’s a minor, but critical, point. Pop culture, like Super Size Me, and public nags like ex-New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and the Center for Science in the Public Interest, always assume the worst of Americans when it comes to fast food. No one would dispute that some of the more notorious offerings out there—those fried chicken buckets, Denny’s Grand Slam, Big Gulps, etc.—are loaded with calories and sugars and fats and are not especially good for you. But the vast majority of Americans consume them on an occasional basis—not daily, or three times a week, or especially three times a day. Indeed, The Scrapbook always assumes that its fellow countrymen are considerably more sensible—about fast food, among many other things—than the Bloombergs and Spurlocks among us tend to believe.
Of course, Jim Delligatti knew that for nearly a century.
