The idea of humans as helpless has, of course, been a trick deployed by prohibitionists and lesser scolds over the years.
Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock has died of cancer at the terribly early age of 53. His movie Super Size Me (2004) played an important part in the obesity panic of the early 2000s, particularly because it was a lively (if sometimes grim) watch, and because it came with a suitably anti-corporate spin. McDonald’s was bad! Helpless consumers had succumbed to the firm’s lures and so on. The idea of humans as helpless has, of course, been a trick deployed by prohibitionists and lesser scolds over the years.
The New York Times was thrilled. In a 2004 review, A. O. Scott wrote:
The arguments in ”Super Size Me” will be familiar to readers of Eric Schlosser’s best-selling ”Fast Food Nation,” and like that book, Mr. Spurlock’s film is as much about corporate power as it is about health. His conclusion is that it’s us or them, that we should kill McDonald’s before McDonald’s kills us. This may be a little melodramatic, but it should nonetheless give you pause. In any case, it seems more likely that we will continue to live in a fast-food world, perhaps more warily (and more queasily) in the wake of Mr. Spurlock’s experience. His movie, which opens nationally today, goes down easy and takes a while to digest, but its message is certainly worth the loss of your appetite.
Spurlock’s film won the Grand Jury Prize for documentary directing at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Oscar.
In the movie, Spurlock described the terrible things that had happened to him after he ate only McDonald’s fare for 30 days straight. Much as I am revolted by McDonald’s fries (little more than sliced cardboard since they stopped frying them in tallow), I was skeptical when I heard about the film’s premise, and was intrigued to hear that Soso Whaley, an animal trainer based in New Hampshire, who was some 20 years older than Spurlock, had also eaten only at McDonald’s for 30 consecutive days, with very different results.
I met up with Soso in, where else, a McDonald’s, just before Super Size Me’s release:
Neither Soso nor I know exactly what Spurlock ate (Super Size Me comes out on May 7), but, as he has described them in numerous interviews, the results were nastier than a four-day-old Bacon Ranch Salad: headaches, vomiting, depression, a super-sized gut and — sad, sad news for his girlfriend (a vegan chef, conspiracy theorists please note) — a shrunken libido. The numbers tell their own terrible story. Spurlock gained 25 pounds and his cholesterol soared (from a modest 165 to a more challenging 230). His body “basically fell apart over the course of thirty days.” His face — oh the horror, the horror — turned “splotchy,” his knees “started to hurt from the extra weight coming on so quickly,” and as for his liver, well, don’t ask. O.K., you can ask. Spurlock’s liver had, in the less than reassuring words of his doctor, “turned into paté.”
. . . Soso’s ground rules were similar to Spurlock’s, but without the compulsory super-sizing, the obligation to finish everything up or, most importantly, the intention of eating, as Soso has put it, “like a troglodyte.” She’s got a point. Condemning McDonald’s on the basis of the kamikaze consumption of Super Size Me makes about as much sense as using Monty Python’s Mr. Creosote as an example of typical restaurant dining. Spurlock’s bizarre breakfasts, lunatic lunches, and demented dinners added up to some 5,000 calories a day, freak-show feasting that proves nothing about McDonald’s.
. . . Above all, Soso’s long march through Mickey D’s menu is an effective demonstration that maligning McDonald’s as one uniquely lethal food group is ridiculous in an age when its restaurants offer far more variety than in the past. There’s green in those golden arches. Vegetables have been spotted! And by vegetables I don’t mean either the wrecks of a Russet that the burger chain calls “fries”. . . .
But there’s no need to feel guilty about sucking down a few burgers as well. They too can be part of a balanced diet. “It’s food,” adds Soso. “Food is food. Don’t eat too much.” People, she argues, need to think about what they eat, and then take responsibility for the consequences. Some exercise would also help. “It’s just too easy to blame McDonald’s.”
Indeed.
Later, Soso made her own movie (Me and Mickey D), some of which is available on YouTube (I make a brief appearance).
Quite a bit later, some details emerged that added (too late) to the skepticism surrounding Spurlock’s claims.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal in May 2018, Phelim McAleer noted that contained within a Me Too mea culpa that Spurlock had written in 2017 was the admission that he had been “consistently . . . drinking since the age of 13.” He hadn’t, he wrote, “been sober for more than a week in 30 years.”
McAleer asked:
Could this be why his liver looked like that of an alcoholic? Were those shakes symptoms of alcohol withdrawal? Mr. Spurlock’s 2017 confession contradicts what he said in his 2004 documentary. “Any alcohol use?” the doctor asks at the outset. “Now? None,” he replies. In explaining his experiment, he says: “I can only eat things that are for sale over the counter at McDonald’s—water included.”
Who knows?
In Spurlock’s obituary in the New York Times, it was noted that
some people pointed out that Mr. Spurlock refused to release the daily logs tracking his food intake. Health researchers were unable to replicate his results in controlled studies.
Commenting on the news of Spurlock’s death, Clay Risen and Remy Tumin of the New York Times noted the criticism of the film but also reveal that bien-pensant disapproval of wicked fast food has not gone away:
[Super Size Me] grossed over $22 million, made Mr. Spurlock a household name and helped spur a sweeping backlash against the fast-food industry — though only temporarily; today, McDonald’s has 42,000 locations worldwide, its stock is near an all-time high, and 36 percent of Americans eat fast food at least once a day.
The horror, the horror.