Soured World View

ON A RECENT visit to McDonald's, I ordered my usual quarter-pounder with cheese, sat down at a table, removed the pickles, and began thinking about a number of the problems facing our world and our country.

A number of things, besides the special sauce, were eating at my insides. After a couple of concerts, a video with Michael Jackson, and the controversy over authentic versus artificial sweat-shirts, the millions of dollars ostensibly raised by USA for Africa for the benefit of the starving Ethiopians weren't reaching their intended recipients. This bothered me.

Meanwhile, in the middle of America, thousands of the people Thomas Jefferson envisioned as the mainstay of our country are losing their farms, their homes, and their hope. Those who survive the agricultural rat race are forced to do things like slaughtering dairy cows to drive up the price of milk in order to pay the bank. This also bothered me.

But suddenly, as if manna from heaven, the solution to these problems stared me right in the face from the bottom of the styrofoam quarter-pounder with cheese package. Two pickles lay dead in a smear of ketchup and mustard, offering up their lives to improve the rest of the world.

The solution, it was perfect: the Golden Arches pays all the pickle farmers they employ to stop producing sour cucumbers and begin producing staples like potatoes, grain and the like. What you've got here is the beginning of an international food distribution service. Since everyone throws out the pickles anyway, we eliminate waste and the needless production of a needless product.

It was beautiful. Not only would millions of the hungry be fed, but never again would I bite into a sour piece of rubber or peel apart a burger in order to extract the urethane substance like a pair of dirty diapers. Millions and millions of Americans would share in the jubilation. For the few who actually liked the pickles, they would be making a minor sacrifice for a grand cause.

The farmers involved in the process could produce without fear of bum crops or low prices forcing foreclosure upon their family and moderate fortune. Waste would be eliminated from the beginning to the end--farmers would not purposefully destroy good crops or hide them in warehouses like nuclear arsenals; employees in the brown and gold polyester would not have to waste the movement of hand to bun with slime in hand; and lastly, new condominiums would not be resting upon a mountain of pickles that have made their run through the sanitation system.

I sat cheerfully in my seat as I had now solved a few of the world's major problems. What could go wrong? McDonald's would never lose business over a few pickles. With billions and billions of hamburgers, that would translate into trillions of pickles and at least millions of dollars. In addition, it would all be tax deductible as charitable donations. There was no possible reason not to adopt the plan, except they did not know.

Now they know.

And the next time I bite into a quarter-pounder with cheese, I'll know I did my part for world hunger.