Hindsight is 50/50

As a parent I go to McDonald’s a lot. While it isn’t the most nutritious place to go it has a play land and they usually give a decent toy with the happy meal. Most of our happy meal toys have outlasted expensive store bought toys.  Yesterday however I wanted a change so I convinced the kids to try out Burger King.

I’ve always enjoyed Burger King’s food more than McDonald’s because their burgers taste more like something I would make on my own BBQ. No one seems to agree with me though and my wife, my parents, and pretty much everyone else seems to hate it.

When we got there is it seemed like a normal burger place, mind you, no one was there. After we got our food and started to eat the most interesting collection of people started to arrive. I can really only describe them as the type of people who would sleep in a bus station. There were kids with rat tails and mullets everywhere and I can only assume a gang meeting was taking place by all teens who were clearly subscribed to “Dress like a gang member quarterly”. The pièce de résistance however was the guy in the booth behind us who had zero qualms about trying to impress his girlfriend with his sexual advances, excessive use of the f-word, and his belching, he was indeed quite a catch! Finally I need to mention how cute it was that all the teen moms in the play areas were tossing their six month olds around the apparatus like they were literally plastic dolls.

The food was actually pretty boring and the toy sucked so bad (the cheapest version of Connect 4 I have ever seen) I took it back and asked for something else.  I was given a baby toy for my 6 and 4 year old and instead of being difficult I said thanks and cut my losses. My flight instinct had kicked in full force and I managed to convince my kids to leave after promising them we would stop at Starbucks for a treat.

I think the most eye opening aspect of my adventures in Burger King were about what I have become. I never thought myself the judgmental sort and perhaps if I were there alone I would have thought nothing of it, I may not have even noticed my surroundings because I would have been deeply entranced by my phone. Since I was there with my family however I was more keenly aware of how uncomfortable the whole environment made me feel. Have I really become the Macbook toting Starbucks loving elitist that I have made fun of in the past? Is that a bad thing?

I remember reading a study a while back in which pigeons were given food pellets to reinforce behavior. In some cases though the pigeons were given food at random times and these pigeons stated displaying odd random behaviors since they didn’t know which action got them the food pellet. Some pigeons thought that shaking their heads yielded a food pellet while others thought that walking backwards would.

I think our entire modern day health food industry mirrors this above observation. If a person lives to be 120 and they smoked and drank their entire lives but used a wooden spoon to stir their food I bet we’d hear reports that using wooden spoons are responsible for a long life. It’s overwhelming trying to keep up with all the things I should be doing to stay healthy when all I should be doing is eating my fruits and vegetables, staying away from junk food, exercising a bit and enjoying my life day to day because as sad as it is, even healthy people develop cancer and heart disease from time to time.