Good food is more than something you wolf down you to keep going. When food is good it becomes rooted in you. It’s love and comfort and a sense of place. You remember when and where you had that good ice cream in the same way you remember when and where that someone special finally said they love you. It’s no surprise that eating chocolate releases the same brain goodness that comes about when you fall in love — certain foods just get you in that indescribable way.
Food is friendship. Plato once called the most virtuous of friendships and relationships as the ones that imprint on your very being — in some way you are the person you are because of the way you know that person — that when asked why the pair of you fit so well you could reply only with “because he was he, and I was I.” (Plato said women/marriage couldn’t provide this connection, which is horseshit because women make better friends but that’s another essay for another day.)
So if we can think of food as a friendship, if we can call a dessert as like “as like a mother’s hug”, then I’d like to set out my stall for the Sausage and Egg McMuffin. A meal that’s defined me and a lot of my scattershot brethren throughout the years.
I first started having McMuffins with regularity in my teens. I was in the Army Cadets (another essay for another day) which meant I spent a lot of weekends getting up at stupid o’clock to do camping and other assorted Action Man adventures. My Dad who can’t cook, would drop me at the local McDonald’s instead of getting breakfast and the connection started from there — me eating Sausage and Egg McMuffins it 7am on a Saturday morning, in a McDonalds not too far from the housing estate, people watching and learning from other souls who had wandered in for bad coffee and dubious eggs.
It’s barely real egg and it’s barely real sausage. Put together between two slightly burnt crispy buns and a dollop of plastic cheese. The Sausage & Egg McMuffin is a Frankenstein creation, a breakfast pill for the broken soul.
Its also without a doubt one of the best worst things to ever happen to food, if you forgive the wonky hyperbole.
The main thing you learn when people-watching Sausage & Egg McMuffins consumers is no one ever eats a Sausage and Egg McMuffin unless they’re in some kind of emotional distress. You don’t have a McMuffin when you are feeling good and are happy. It’s a fake food where the great redeeming quality is the hollow sense of fullness you have after eating one. Nice, well adjusted people who like their current life state don’t eat Sausage and Egg McMuffins. No, it’s the food of the scattershot, the erratic, the hungover, the overworked, the “in need of a pick me up” and the “fucking hell this again?” crowd.
And that’s why it is excellent, because it’s less a mother’s hug and more a cool uncle’s slap around the head and telling you “cheer up dickhead.”
It’s a food perfectly designed to Get. You. Through.
Fake egg on fake sausage telling you not ‘Every little thing is going to be alright’, but ‘Really, again? Alright but don’t come see me more than twice this month.’
When you’re hungover and barely slept after doing God knows what in Clapham on a Sunday morning, you need the slight guilt that eating a McMuffin provides over the reassuring lie a bacon bap offers. Bacon baps on crusty French baguettes are for winners, you’re eating this McMuffin because you slept through your alarm and you have to give a presentation at work this morning. Spin again rookie, try harder not to end up in this spot next time.
It’s the perfectly balanced pill for the fuck up and broken bodied. Not the double, which has too much meat and fucks up the ratio, or the bacon and egg which is too salty, but the single sausage and egg.
Forgiveness and gentle ribbing for less than the price of a pint. The greatest confessional there is, a little round bun sold at a heartless mega corporation. If McDonalds follows through and starts selling them 24hrs, all of us with no self control will be screwed. After all, it was the 10.30 cut off time that dragged so many of us out of bed when we were feeling our worst.
