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.
