McDonald's Bugs Me

Okay, so yesterday I had gone out to McDonald's and picked up an Asian chicken salad to eat for lunch while working on my PR recap. I love these (especially the Newman's dressing).

You know that most fast-food salads are iceberg lettuce (not the most nutritional kind) because that is cheap. I also know that McDonald's gets their salad in big bags and some machine has just chopped up entire heads of lettuce. They don't have time to pick out the useless parts at the restaurant. This particular salad has a higher percentage of white stalky parts than usual and I have had to pick a lot of it out. I'm about 2/3 of the way through what is left. I go to pick out yet another white piece when I notice... there's a dead beetle on it. (I know this is gross, bear with me.) It's kind of dried up so it's been there a while.

Ordinarily I don't eat bugs. I know they're all protein and you can eat them (and in this particular salad the bug was probably one of the more nutritious things in it). It isn't a huge beetle either. So I throw it away, along with the rest of the salad. (Good thing I was almost done.) I'm not too freaked out, because I know that when I make salad at home from full heads of iceberg lettuce, I sometimes find bugs. They climb into the heads in the field and go way down in the bottom and get stuck and die. It's just a fact of farming. You just have to make sure you wash the lettuce really well and don't use the bottom parts.

As bothersom as the bug in the salad is, it will never - NEVER - top the Chicken McNugget Episode. One evening a couple of years ago my kids wanted Happy Meals. It had started to snow, and there was a big storm coming and we may have been stuck inside all weekend, so I say what the heck. We go through the drive-thru. At home, the kids start opening their Happy Meals. My son, however, is staring at his open box of McNuggets with a puzzled look on his face. I ask him what's wrong and he says, "Mom, what's this?" I look in the box and find that IT IS FULL OF MAYONNAISE. No nuggets, just a big glob of mayo.

I don't know if someone was cleaning out the nozzle on the mayo squirter and used a nugget box, and then someone else accidentally put it on the rack, or what. My husband immediately got on the phone and tried call the restaurant, but nobody answered. We didn't take it back because by this time the storm was in full blizzard mode. In the end his little sister gave him half her nuggets, and I made them grilled cheese sandwiches.

But to this day, whenever he gets any kind of fast food in a box like that (especially from McDonald's), he always says, "I hope there's no mayonnaise in here."