The McDonald’s on Sixth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan Used to Sizzle. Now It Sputters.

I can rely on the McDonald’s between 46th and 47th Street on Sixth Avenue to produce certain sensations at every meal.

There is that unmistakable aromatic signature that is so consistent and so unique that it has produced scores of online conspiracy theories about secret additives, processing techniques and varieties of potato, all of which I push to the back of my mind because I want to enjoy my hamburger. The smell hits me from about a block away, causing my arteries to pulse with anticipation.

There is the loud drone of noisy air conditioning vying with the ranks of bubbling deep fat fryers behind the counter, over which I raise my voice slightly to make my order audible to the McDonald’s crew member, as the other customers stand around in sullen silence, waiting for their number to be called, generally with some line like “Here are your vitamins.”

There is the thud of the flap on the trash receptacle as I shake tray paper, cardboard sandwich box, French fry container and ketchup sachets—used and intact—into the bin, while trying not to touch anything. THANK YOU, says the trash flap as I scurry down the stairs.

And as I emerge into the flow of tourists, investment bankers and panhandlers, there is the unshakable sense that I have hours to live.

The last sensation was not part of the McDonald’s experience when I started eating there, in the 1990s, when I was a child. I was aware that it was not healthy food, because a Happy Meal was regarded as a special treat and I had been brought up to understand that all the great tasting things in life were bad for you. My mom had to pay because, as a child, I didn’t have money of my own, but I don’t think it broke the bank. A trip to McDonald’s made me feel alive in a way that few other things did, probably because of all the sugar, although I was only allowed to go every couple of weeks or so.

I don’t remember when the doubts began, but they grew over time.

Diners who walk in the door aren’t greeted; they’re processed. A crew member periodically yells out that there are supposed to be three separate lines, which everyone ignores. There is almost always a wait, with or without a two-for-one coupon. A reassuring wink from the weird-looking guy in the corner would at least give you something to think about. The wink never comes. Peter Luger Steak House in Brooklyn is an illegal warehouse rave compared with the line at McDonald’s on Sixth Avenue.

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The servers, whom I looked up to as fully-grown adults when I was seven or eight years old, now appear to be little more than children to me. But some things are the same as ever. The coffee has always been served at the temperature of the surface of the sun. The contents of the apple pie have always been served at the temperature of the same sun during a period of intense solar flare activity.

The fries, which are produced by literally shooting peeled potatoes through a slicer at up to 70 miles per hour before coating them in 12 different chemicals, are reasonably crisp when fresh. However, they become mealy and bland when left overnight in the passenger-side footwell of a modestly-priced sedan, despite all the preservatives. The Filet-O-Fish sandwich — yes, I’m the person who ordered the Filet-O-Fish at McDonald’s — was strangely similar, or perhaps not so strangely when you consider that it is fried in the exact same proprietary combination of canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil and hydrogenated soybean oil.

The same issue affects almost everything else on the menu. Sure, the beef patties in the Big Mac are 100% pure USDA inspected beef with no fillers and no extenders, but the Big Mac Sauce is mostly just soybean oil.

Other restaurants, and not just steakhouses, buy beef that is tender and and richly marbled.

But those restaurants are not McDonald’s, as Slavoj Zizek might have said.

“Lacan frames objet petit a as a signifier without a signified; it is ambiguous,” writes Antonio Garcia of the Zizekian Institute for Research, Inquiry, and Pedagogy. “For example, when McDonald’s uses its slogan ‘I’m loving it’, the ‘it’ has no substance or signification. One then assumes or interprets ‘it’ as infinitely as one wants: chicken nuggets, Big Mac, sweet tea, etc.”

Similarly, other fast food chains have no substance or signification compared with McDonald’s.

McDonald’s is not the oldest, but it’s the one in which production-line conformity and economies of scale came together to produce something that felt less like a hamburger than an affirmation of capitalism itself, which is functionally the same thing as life as it is lived in New York City. That may sound absurd, but it’s true, and I think that if you re-read your copy of The Fountainhead, you will know what I mean.

McDonald’s will always have its loyalists. They will laugh away the Propylene Glycol Alginate that tastes like 1985 and the single menu item that is just two cheeseburgers. They will say that nobody goes to McDonald’s for the Filet-O-Fish sandwich, nobody goes to McDonald’s for a glass of wine, nobody goes to McDonald’s to have a dental exam and cleaning. The list goes on, and you start to wonder who really, really needs to go to McDonald’s, and you start to think the answer is you.