Big Mac with kale in a doomsday reduction

May 11, 2015 Originally published on SFGate

Did you hear? Taco Bell is going to start selling burritos wrapped in shells made entirely of purified air! Amazing. Also, Pizza Hut is reportedly testing a more “relaxing” pie made with something called “Mindfulness Meditation Mozzarella.” Whoa! And Hot Pockets microwaveable cancer bombs will now donate 95% of all proceeds to whatever the hell happened to your colon after you ate one.

Did you hear about any of that? Of course you didn’t. Because none of those stories is actually true.

But this one is: McDonald’s is going kale.

It's green! It's edible! It's healthy! Show your Southern friends.

It’s green! It’s edible! It’s healthy! Show your Southern friends.

True! Pink slime’s favorite vendor just might start adding kale to salads or smoothies (for the health-averse and those living in or around the South: kale is a dark, leafy uber-green “vegetable” that’s “grown” in the “earth,” and is currently all the rage among fitness types and your annoying vegan relative who posts endless blurry photos of all the dried kale chips she bakes for her dog).

Kale! At McDonald’s! Not a joke. The obesity/cancer/diabetes king is currently on a tear trying to remake its “even the homeless won’t eat our leftovers” image and catch up with the vaguely healthy Chipotle’s of the world. Good luck with that.

Will it work? Of course it won’t work. No one, not even the most self-deluded junk-food advocate, eats at McDonald’s to actually, you know, feel good.

You go to McD’s (or Taco Bell, or KFC, et al) because it’s cheap, convenient, packed to the rubbery, nauseating gills with highly addictive chemicals, salt, HFCS for days. You go because it’s all shot through with creepy, scientifically engineered, 100% artificial scents and flavorings that have nothing whatsoever to do with actual food but who cares because you’ll be dead soon anyway.

More chemicals and artificial flavorings per square inch than, say, asphalt

More chemicals and artificial flavorings per square inch than, say, asphalt

Are you tracking the madness? Are you keeping any sort of running tally of the bizarre inbreeding happening in various brands, personalities, apps and gizmos? It ain’t easy. It’s all mutating more quickly, and more wildly than ever.

Here’s one more: This Guardian headline caught my eye, somehow, in an ocean of everything already being indelibly and uncontrollably weird: “Britney Spears and Iggy Azalea debut new single Pretty Girls to Uber riders.”

Wait, what? To who? It’s weird enough that a washed out ‘90s pop princess-cum-Vegas lounge act teamed up with that skinny, white, fake-rapping model from New Zealand for a new and quite awful song, but it borders on surreal that it was not debuted on the radio, or on iTunes, or in a nightclub, but… in a bunch of cabs.

Not just any cabs, of course, but cabs from a company desperate beyond measure to cater to every whim and obnoxious burp of the hilariously entitled post-Millennial set, the same generation already accustomed to doing almost nothing for themselves, and instead merely opening any of 1000 convenience-economy apps that will perform any task, deliver any meal, pot, cocktail, song, shirt, shoe shine, haircut, laundry, you name it, to their pale and lazy feet.

Par for the course, baby. Anything’s possible these days, right? Any mutation, combination, absurdly awesome articulation. I look forward to – oh hell, I don’t know – Monster Energy drink distributing its new kombucha/cocaine body shot to all new Tesla buyers. Through the steering wheel. While you drive. Via vaporizer. Progress!

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Mark Morford

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