The most popular vegetable in the US is the potato. The majority of the country's potato crop goes into frozen food, most of which consists of french fries. McDonald's sells about nine million pounds of fries every day, making it their #1 item. And many folks say that McDonald's fries are the best you can get. Those fries are the result of years of research and struggle to standardize every serving of fries at every McDonald's outlet, so they will be the same no matter which restaurant you get them from. That doesn't mean they haven't changed over time. The biggest difference is when they changed what kind of oil they were fried in, a move that customers still lament if they are old enough to remember it. Tom Blank of Weird History Food explains what makes McDonald's fries so enticing. But remember, it's fast food, so you better eat them fast. Once they are cold, the magic is completely gone.
I don't like chicken-paste nuggets, either. Safeway used to have real breaded deep-fried chicken breasts (better than KFC), a cheap fresh salad bar (incl. cheese chunks, and sliced ham!) and a whole section of tables and chairs. For a couple of years I worked right around the corner from there, and every day I'd go there for lunch, spend ten minutes' pay on food, sit down for half an hour or more, eat, read the Anderson Valley Advertiser, or the whole San Francisco Chronicle (either for a quarter or from a pile of them other people left behind). The only bad time in all of that, besides eventually getting fired from that job, was: I forgot and left behind my favorite best coat ever, a beige-gray long, lined, cotton/linen duster you could use for a blanket if you ever had to sleep on a bench. I went right back for it, but someone had already taken it. It wasn't in the lost and found. I have never had another article of clothing I liked as much as that coat, and I've never seen another one like it except in noir films.
The best hamburger, for only slightly more than at McDonalds, is in Jenny's Giant Burger at the north end of town, next to the bowling alley that went out of business when the lumber mill failed, that before that was the champ of hamburgers: the grill in the bowling alley served up a juicy, crisped, peppered log of burger with fat slices of onion and tomato on thick sourdough bread toasted on the grill next to the meat. Kosher pickles. Fries. And squeeze bottles of ketchup, mayo and mustard on the counter. Except for Jenny's, that whole world is gone.
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