Opinion – Gross Kitchen: Big Mac with fries on the deathbed

McDonalds. This is the last wish of most patients in the palliative care center at the Unicamp hospital, health professionals reported to Sheetin a report published on the 23rd.

People with advanced disease, when there is no longer any hope of cure or treatment, seek comfort in the Big Mac, chicken nuggets, fries in hydrogenated vegetable fat. This is the food that brings them good memories and peace of mind.

The choice of fast food as a deathbed meal is a symptom of a gigantic tragedy, of planetary dimension.

It’s not about censoring the hospital’s employees, much less the patients’ wishes. I would go back to smoking, without hesitation, a pack of red Marlboro a day if I knew I was going to die soon.

The tragedy lies in the realization that the food industry has hijacked our tastes and affections with sugar, fat, sodium, flavorings, colorings and an avalanche of advertising.

And it goes further: so consolidated, the kidnapping inhabits the imagination of those who no longer have anything to lose or gain. It goes for those on the verge of death, it also goes for those who have been deprived of food choices for lack of money.

In the other column I write for Folha, Recipes from Marcão, I have a thematic series of dishes from the countries that will compete in the World Cup. Obviously I know very little about several of these cuisines, so I need to research about them.

It’s potatoes: recipes from African, Latin American and Eastern European countries almost always have a ready-made industrial seasoning, a magic powder that has penetrated ancestral traditions. I adapt the recipe, eliminate those ingredients and play the ball forward.

There is still a marketer’s nostalgia for selling a certain “affective cuisine”. A construction, fanciful or fallacious, of a recent past in which eating habits were uncorrupted.

The American Michael Pollan, author of books on food, is often quoted by people who put their grandmother in the middle when talking about the quality of food.

“Don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food”, is printed in the Brazilian translation of “Food Rules” (“Rules da Comida”, Intrinseca, 2010).

Then you go research the original and find that Pollan wrote “great-grandmother”, great-grandmother. Because, at this point in the championship, the thesis is worth very little if we are going to talk about grandmothers.

Here’s a brief statement about the articles that used to be in my mother’s kitchen (who, by the way, is already a great-grandmother) in the 1970s and 80s.

She didn’t make pudding, she made flan from a box. She baked pizza with box dough. She bought bouillon cubes and powdered spices by the tons.

When the first McDonald’s opened in São Paulo, in the distant 1981, my parents ran there eagerly. They sought to revive flavors of the year when, as young people, they lived in the United States.

The kidnapping of affection was already consummated in the days of my grandson’s great-grandmother, I’m sorry to say.

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