I'm Dissectin' It: The Big Mac Deconstructed Day Two -- Deep Into The Guts

McDonalds -- you hot, sexy marketing machine, you -- is jumping on the blog wagon in order to improve their public perception. Six moms will be spending time behind the counter at McDonalds and blogging about their experiences.

It seems the Clown has been on the receiving end of a lot of bad press about their contribution to childhood obesity, as well as over environmental concerns, the quality of work there, et cetera. And having a bunch of moms behind the counter saying things like "holy crap, these futon-patties are FRESH, not FROZEN!" will help immensely.

Honestly, I'm not sure how my humble contribution will lower the calorie-count on a Big Mac, or make the life of the guy stuffing it into a box will help, but there you have it. Perception is reality, it seems.

So, let's see what one perceives when a Big Mac is disassembled. Today, I'm taking a look at the guts of the Mac.

The pickles appear to be more-or-less perfectly normal, as are the teeny little bits that appear to be onions. Or so it seems - the onions are pretty much uniformly sunk into the sauce.

The lettuce -- or, as I like to think of it, "the side salad" -- is uniformly chopped up into orderly little bits. I tried reassembling them into something resembling a lettuce leaf, like a lab tech on "CSI" reassembling a shredded business document, but to no avail. On balance, I was surprised by the unusual whiteness of the lettuce. Statistically speaking, I suppose a greater-than-average number of my leaf fragments could have come from the whiter parts of the leaves, rather than the green one traditionally associates with lettuce.

Finally, we arrive at the heart of the matter: The Special Sauce.

I'm telling you, it's Thousand Islands salad dressing. It's no more "special" than ketchup or mustard or mayonnaise would be. It looks like it, it tastes like it, it becomes greasy when exposed to heat (example: a burger patty) like it.

Then again, we are talking about a company that starts a PR campaign every time a dictionary reports that people who speak English use the term McJob to mean "An unstimulating low-paid job with few prospects, especially one created by the expansion of the service sector". Just like when a film company takes a dozen film critics from Podunk and puts them on an expenses-paid press junket for three days so that a piece of crap movie gets rave reviews like "THE MOST INCREDIBLE ACTION FAMILY DRAMA COMEDY HORROR ROMANCE MYSTERY MOVIE IN YEARS! YOU'LL LAUGH/CRY/SCREAM/SHIT/THINK YOURSELF TO DEATH!!"

...with the critic's name in tiny print beneath the rave...

So, maybe having moms behind the counter blogging about how fresh the buns are really will make things better, somehow. Maybe perception is reality. Maybe the sauce really is "special."

McDonald's, you are doubleplusgood!