A reasonably well prepared hamburger is not "junk food."

Think about it. Ground round (granted McDonald's mixes it half-and-half with wet cardboard), bread in the form of a bun, and the usual fixin's like lettuce, tomato, a little mayo (ingredients often found in salads), perhaps a bit of mustard and/or ketchup, and a pickle slice or two. Not junk food. Until people started assuming that hamburgers were junk food, nutritionists (sometimes a bit grudgingly) regarded the hamburger as a reasonably well-balanced meal.

That's a fact.

Now, if you let it sit in a warming oven until it renders out the fat that's in all meat and starts basting itself with it, then it turns into a piece of soggy, tasteless crap. But it's still not going to clog your veins any more that any comparable quantity of beef (in fact, the wet cardboard in a Big Mac should actually reduce that amount of fat). It's the super-size order of deep-fat fries that go with it, along with the milk shake that, if your other meals consist of a bowl of Froot-Loops or an Egg McMuffin in the morning and a pizza or a couple of Hot-Pockets, not to mention the two bags of Cheezy-Chips and the energy bar and the incessant stream of M&Ms from the vending machine and the pint of Ben and Jerry's to round out the day's food intake—day after day after day—that's eventually gonna have someone dialing 911 in your behalf as you lay there on the floor clutching your chest and gasping for breathe.

Eat a raw carrot now and then. But don't be a damned fanatic.

Don Firth