I was embarrassed to find an ally in Donald Trump. His love of Big Macs, Filet-O-Fishes and Diet Coke made people’s heads explode. When he served a feast of fast food at the White House? The scandal!
Still, for me, McDonald’s in the White House sounded like a dream. It was easy to laugh at the contradictions between Donald Trump’s cultural tastes and his class status, but I understood that those very contradictions are what made him a democrat-with-a-lowercase-d, just another American who ate processed food, what he calls “Great American food.”
But the more time I spent in this world of homemade ice cream and duck and kale, the more familiar it became to me and I to it. Further moments of alienation helped accelerate my assimilation: “Oh, you’re from the Rio Grande Valley?” a professor with limited experience of the area once asked me. “That’s where they think Olive Garden is a fancy restaurant, right?” My new peers might have been ignorant of the foods that raised me, but I wasn’t going to return the favor.
I have expanded my culinary horizons. When I moved to New York in 2021, I decided to stock my kitchen with many of the pots, pans and gadgets recommended by the website Serious Eats. I bought and skimmed the cookbook “Salt Fat Acid Heat.” I learned how to brine and roast a chicken. I started buying salads from Trader Joe’s.
I didn’t stop eating processed foods. In fact, I probably ate more of them. In the maelstrom of the last three years, a time filled with loss, uncertainty and change, in which I graduated from college during a pandemic and moved to New York to start a job that was supposed to last only a year, I sought an anchor in the foods of my youth. I wanted to recapture that magic, the excitement at the prospect of satisfaction and pleasure. So I ate McDonald’s and Little Caesars and Hamburger Helper, trying to achieve what the food writer M.F.K. Fisher describes as that “warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied.”
The old comfort, however, was nowhere to be found. It felt as if I was sitting at a slot machine, pulling the lever over and over, waiting for this order, this pizza, this French fry to make me feel like I’d hit the jackpot. But the food just made me feel sick. My skin would itch, my stomach would turn. I’d get a headache.