If you've never been to a “McDonald's Night,” consider yourself lucky. Now in theory, this is a “win-win” proposition: a fundraiser for my children's school and a night out of the kitchen. It has never been truer, alas, that the proof of the theoretical pudding is in the existential eating thereof.
The “night” begins with my children coming home from school as walking advertisements. When the day arrives, families from our children's school are “invited” to come to McDonald's. In exchange for the pleasure of our company (and, of course, our business), McDonald's will donate a small amount of money to our children's school (that is, only if I remember to tell the cashier the name of the school in the midst of fighting the crowds, ordering our food, and trying to talk over lots of yelling children).
My children love McDonald's Night for the same reasons I hate it: lots of yelling children and, most importantly, the Happy Meal, which includes a “free” toy (usually promoting Disney's latest movie). The happiness quickly fades, however, if they do not get the toy they want, the toy breaks, or one child gets a different (better) toy than the other. As David McCarthy notes in The Good Life, his family now calls the Happy Meal “the Disappointing Meal, because it doesn't seem to make anyone happy, and it certainly is not a meal.”
Now, I have no desire simply to bash McDonald's. Their play areas have provided much needed reprieves on long trips between Richmond and Alabama to visit family. And yet, eating there cannot be entirely separated from the philosophy of Ray Kroc, the man who franchised McDonald's and made it famous. “This is not [an industry],” Kroc once said, “This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I'll kill 'em, and I'm going to kill 'em before they kill me. You're talking about the American way of survival of the fittest.”1
It has been famously observed that a “man is what he eats.” More to the point here, however, might be to say that a man is how he eats. The ultimate danger of the fast-food nation is not the trans fat in the fries, the sugar in the special sauce, or the 18 cows that are apparently represented in the ground beef of one patty. The danger is that the way we are being trained to eat is also a way we are learning to see and understand the world.
There are terrific implications here for the way we do church, specifically the way we eat and drink. Like many other Southern Baptists, one of the most enduring personal images of the church were the seeming miles of tables at our Sunday “dinner on the grounds,” all of them groaning under the weight of the dishes. For me, that great day when people come from north, south, east and west will look like one of those dinners. What it will not resemble is the sip of grape juice and the crumb of bread that was my portion when we observed the Lord's Supper.
The fact is that to eat is to participate in a way of life that is larger than we ever consciously realize. While it is the forces of the global market that gather people at McDonald's, Christians confess that it is God who gathers and creates the church. True, we may enter the church for all sorts of less-than-noble reasons. But the church, like Israel, is God's creation. One of the ways God creates the church is by feeding her. Just as we nourish and care for our own bodies, Christ nourishes and tenderly cares for his own body: the church (Ephesians 5:29-30).
The implication of fast food is that there is something more important out there that needs to be done. The meal is something to be gotten out of the way so that we can get to the real thing. The Lord's Supper, by contrast, says that it is the most important thing there is because it is what gathers, forms and feeds the people of God. We know ourselves in and through this meal.
We know the abundance of manna provided on a daily basis so that we need not hoard; the abundance of multiplied fish and loaves so that we live generously before, and for, the world; and the abundance of communion with God and each other. Hungering, thirsting and eating fully from this abundance frees us to see that scarcity, competition and survival of the fittest ought not determine our lives — McDonald's to the contrary.
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Beth Newman
Professor of Theology and Ethics
Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond
1 Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation, the Dark Side of the All-American Meal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2001), p. 37.