Julia Child wasn’t raised to fear food. She didn’t prepare meals based on how heart-healthy they were. She championed saturated fat as if her 6-foot-2 frame were somehow immune to the dietary laws that lay waste to the arteries of lesser mortals. “If you’re afraid of butter,” she once said, “use cream.”
But unlike some of her allies who toiled to Frenchify the American palate in the 20th century, Child was no snob. She could flit from French haute cuisine to In-N-Out without a second thought. But her affection for fast food dead-ended at the Big Mac, which, for better or for worse, is the defining dish of American popular culture, the hamburger known ’round the world.
“The Big Mac I like least because it’s all bread,” she once told Time magazine for a tasting of the McDonald’s menu.
In preparation for the Double Big Mac’s latest assault on McDonald’s menus this week, I rolled my car through a local drive-through to refresh my memory about the signature sandwich. When I plucked the Big Mac from its cardboard coffin, I was struck by something I hadn’t noticed before: The burger felt tiny in my hands, as if this were some runt cousin to the real Mac daddy. I was assured from McDonald’s corporate office that the Big Mac is not the latest victim of shrinkflation. Its size has not changed.
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Regardless (and with all due respect to the grande dame of French gastronomy), the little Big Mac I had that night didn’t strike me as a loaf of bread hiding two desiccated slivers of ground beef. Yes, the sandwich was dominated by the flavors of pickle brine, onion and special sauce. But those were quickly followed by the Big Mac’s softer elements: bun, cheese and those twin pucks of beef, their whisper of ruminant fat just enough to trick the brain into thinking you’re locked in battle with a real five-napkin burger, minus the juices dripping down your arm. I polished that Big Mac off in about four bites and wondered where the rest was.
Two days later, I pulled up to the drive-through window again to order a pair of Double Big Macs, which debuted in 1993 and are available again for a limited time. (You might recall that this four-patty Big Mac made a brief appearance on menus in March 2020 before the pandemic broke our supply chain into a million pieces.) For a real-time comparison, I also ordered another regular Big Mac. This was done in the name of science.
As I did back in 2018 for a comparison of signature fast-food burgers, I placed my sandwiches (and their individual patties) on a scale. McDonald’s beef patties, by themselves, were roughly 30 grams each. The Big Mac as a whole clocked in around 200 grams, while the steroidal, double-beef version weighed about 270 grams. Based on my calculations, my Big Mac was about 30 percent beef, and the double meat variation about 44 percent.
This seems like a small increase, right? But when you sink your teeth into a Double Big Mac, you immediately grasp the difference. It chews likes a burger worthy of a name that connotes American largesse — and excess — in a way the original Big Mac rarely, if ever, does. You feel the meatiness of the Double Big Mac. You taste it, too, which is not an insignificant feat. By and large, McDonald’s patties rate low on my internal Beef-O-Meter, save for the fresh one tucked into the Quarter Pounder, which, in a relatively short period of time, has become the most crave-able item on Mickey D’s menu.
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If you bite into a regular, floppy, 30-gram McDonald’s patty all by itself, it doesn’t taste like much; it has been rendered into a ground-beef coil barely clinging to its original purpose. But if you stack enough of these gray discs between three slices of bread, you have something approaching real beef flavor. I think Julia would agree with me on this one.
But the real calculation is one that’s all but impossible to figure out: Is the pleasure of a Double Big Mac worth the potential harm? It’s a question with no real answer. One Double Big Mac won’t harden your arteries, just as one won’t raise the planet’s temperature. But what about millions of Double Big Macs sold daily over the next few weeks? What impact will that have? Maybe it would be insignificant, too.
But asking the question is important. So is refraining from the needless indulgence of a burger that trades in excess and more excess. The original Big Mac suffices, despite the immortal words of Julia Child, God rest her magnificent soul.
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