McHealthies Don’t Satisfry

We don’t go to fast-food places for healthy food. Well, not to the big-boy classics. We, together, prove this, over and over.

McDonald's tried salads costing more than its (grain-to-industrial-cattle subsidized) burgers, which were, until recently, made from ammonia-soaked meat dross. What a surprise; the high-calorie salads failed to break 2 percent or so of sales.

KFC had to go with initials to get the “fry” word out of its title.

And now Burger King has admitted that it intends to drop Satisfries — its much-mocked, lower-calorie french fries — from a whole lot of its locations. The company said something in corporate-speak about “responding to consumer wishes.” Otherwise known as testing the market and reacting. Otherwise known as staying in business. Many people thought the Satisfries, well, weren’t.

Truth is, we just don’t trust long-established conventional fast-food food places to feed us anything resembling healthy food. We used to call these naughty foods or guilty pleasures. Now, it feels like they’re just not-very-good cheap eats.

The big chains previously gave us foods that were familiar, friendly and inexpensive. They’ve stuck with the familiar, but with our growing knowledge of the real nature of the ingredients, how they’re paid for and what the health costs turn out to be in the long run, this all doesn’t seem so friendly and not at all inexpensive, except at the actual point of sale. Today it’s cheap, but someday I may need a stent and quadruple bypass…

But that doesn’t mean that healthy foods can’t be fast. Chipotle and a whole host of healthy fast- and fast-casual hot spots are popping up all over the country. Small, up-and-coming chains like Sweetgreen, Tender Greens and LYFE Kitchen are grabbing attention for offering healthful menu items — think "humanely raised" grass-fed beef, organic veggies and local greens — while also pulling in impressive revenues. The New York Times dubbed it the “farm to counter” movement.

A Sweetgreen location in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Bill Couch/Flickr)

This is an exciting, but rather slow, fast-food process. Really good food needs to be fairly local, seasonal, fresh and not altered by chemical enhancements or stabilizers. That takes practice and organization, as well as going against the (whole, heirloom) grain of a highly industrialized food system. But it’s happening.

Healthy, tasty food can be fast, yes. Affordable, relatively. Cheap? Not so much. And that’s where the Mickey D’s and the Burger Kings fall short. Nobody wants to give them enough cash for them to be able to give us good food. They’ve spent millions convincing us that we can have tasty gunk at low prices with no negative impact and now they’re stuck with a financial model that’s beginning to quiver and quake. Workers want more than welfare-supported jobs. Moms want something wholesome for their kids that’s also fun. Push is coming to shove.

McDonald's can think about selling fresh fruit, but it’s most likely going to be industrial (blueberries, under consideration as a future McDonald's menu item, are on the top-ten list of pesticide residue…) and more easily scooped up at the grocery store. The company may stage stunts having fancy chefs whip up treats using its “nuggets” and whatnot, but it will still be gussied up lousy food.

So what’s the future for these fast-food giants? Well, they seem to have a lot of really good real estate…

Top photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images