Pigging Out to Make a Point

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

For 30 days, a trim, fit, politically correct fellow named Morgan Spurlock took all his meals--breakfast, lunch and dinner, no exceptions, no excuses, no midnight raids on the fridge for a side salad--at McDonald's while directing the film crews recording his horror story.

Some results of his ordeal, as reported in his documentary Super Size Me, are predictable: he gained 24.5 lbs., and his cholesterol count shot up alarmingly. Some are less so: the amount of damage he did to his liver was roughly the same as if he had been on an alcohol binge of a similar duration. There is also evidence that he became something of a fast-food addict, with his sense of well-being increasingly dependent on the rush his fat-and fructose-laden eats provided. You come away from his film convinced that "Happy Meal" is something more than a trademark. For a certain class of Americans, it is the cheapest available source of bliss--ephemeral yet palpable.

If all Super Size Me had to offer was a portrait of Spurlock growing increasingly gray, whiny and, finally, scared about what he's doing to himself, it would be no more than an attention-getting device by a slightly smarmy man who rather lacks Michael Moore's bullying star quality. Face it, even in a nation where a quarter of the population eats at least once a week in a fast-food joint, mass emulation of his diet is unlikely.

What's best in Spurlock's film is what's most conventional about it--talking heads speaking persuasively about how a huge American industry seduces the innocent with cheesy toys and free playgrounds. In this effort, government at every level is complicit. The feds ship sloppy joe makings to grateful school-lunch programs--it's the cheapest grub available. Other schools contract for pizza and sodas from corporate purveyors while cutting back on phys-ed classes. And everyone starts getting fatter younger. And sicker younger--with all the attendant social and medical costs.

Spurlock's critics--some of them paid operatives of the food industry--say it's no mystery that he gained weight force feeding himself Big Macs to the tune of 5,000 calories a day. One of his detractors put herself on an all-McDonald's diet and managed to lose 10 lbs. in 30 days, eating fewer than 2,200 calories a day. Her movie is due out in late summer.

There is, however, one mystery Super Size Me and, indeed, most commentaries on the obesity epidemic do not address. Everyone knows that fat is ugly and that it kills. The press has been all over this story for years while at the same time celebrating the svelte and the diets that make them that way. So it's not enough to say the fast-food industry's propaganda trumps our mass desire to be slender. Something else must be operative here--some desperate need for sugary comfort that all the green, leafy vegetables in the world cannot satisfy. We still say it's spinach, and we still say the hell with it. --By Richard Schickel