Meat Mr Gorske

Tell me this does not look great!

I live by a few basic tenets, one of which is, there are certain days when just nothing is going to do but that we have a Big Mac for dinner.  Oh I know, they are just the worst thing that a person can eat, or not, depending on which recent study you read.  And any scientist knows that it's possible to live to be ninety nine if one is willing to forgo red meat, alcohol and sex, but then again, those would be ninety-nine pretty doggone boring years, now wouldn't they?

So, everything in moderation.  My nutritionist tells me, go ahead and have a slab of huckleberry pie; just make up for it by cutting back elsewhere.  And there was a time that I could eat like a horse and still be the size of a jockey.  A very tall jockey, to be sure, but I was one slim dude back in the day: 6' 4", 140 lbs were the stats on my first driver's license, issued during the Lincoln administration.



But here's a lucky dude: twice lucky, because he's a retired prison guard, which means he doesn't have to roam the halls of the pokey and hear the mournful wail of a harmonica and a lachrymose voice moaning, "Nobody Knows The Trouble I've Seen" any more.   Don Gorske is his name, he's from Fond Du Lac, WI, and Don ate 9 Big Macs on May 17, 1972 (I bet you don't remember what you did that day; neither do I, but we would have if we had stuffed 18 all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions on 9 sesame seed rolls, am I wrong?) and he liked them so much he took to eating them almost every day.  The other day, Mr Gorske consumed his 25,000th Big Mac, and before you get to thinking that his cholesterol must be right up there with the Dow Jones averages, you'll have to guess again.  The article I read says he's slender, gets a good checkup, cholesterol looks fine, and - I like this part - he logs in his McIntake on a calendar, so he can look back over the years and reminisce about all those burgers.  I also like how he says he gobbles every Mac in sixteen bites: no more, no fewer.  You wanna know what that is? That's consistency, my friend.  Consistency.

There are 540 calories in a Big Mac, according to McDonald's, and that is more than a quarter of the calories a person on a 2,000-calorie diet would consume. The burger also contains 29 grams of fat and 1,040 grams of sodium, which are both more than 40 percent of the Food and Drug Administration's daily recommended value for a 2,000-calorie diet.  So we're not looking at a watercress salad here, but, again, to each his own.  Gorske's metabolism, honed by years of walking slowly down cellblocks filled with crooks, must be one of the best of all time, so I say, keep chowing down, Don!

Hey, what's for dinner?