Don't knock it!


And what's so bad about fast food, anyway? There are certain quite positive things to be said for it (not including the fact that most kids are more than willing to eat it, making finding a place to feed them while on the road rather easy). Hard as it may be for me to admit it, fast food restaurants have, over the years, been continually improving their fare, making it cleaner and healthier.

After being defrosted, the hero of Woody Allen's film Sleeper tells his doctors that, before being put into cryostasis (is there a verb for that?) for 200 years, he ran a health food store. For many years I've paraphrased the line that the doctors then tell him:
Oh, then you'll be interested to learn that we've definitively determined that the best foods for you are Mcdonald's hamburgers and coca-cola.
Though I've quoted this often, it apparently isn't the precise wording. From the IMDb pages on that film, however, we find the following:
Dr. Melik: [puzzling over list of items sold at Miles' old health-food store] ... wheat germ, organic honey and... tiger's milk.
Dr. Aragon: Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.
Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or... hot fudge?
Dr. Aragon: [chuckling] Those were thought to be unhealthy... precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.
Dr. Melik: Incredible!
I'm not sure I'd go so far as to claim that in the future we'll discover that fast food is actually good for us, but I suppose that I have to admit that there's something to be said for it - just as there is for the ability to quickly and easily prepare and publish a web page.



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