It’s a simple question. I’ve had one occasionally in the UK, and they are absolutely tiny. Might be stacked burgers but barely a couple of inches across in size.
Is it just an act of blatant misadvertising which has become accepted over the years, or do they actually make it a LOT bigger in the US? I can’t believe with the relatively large sandwiches and massive bagels I’ve had in the states, that this goes uncommented on…
They’re doing a campaign in the US for a Grand Mac, to make it bigger. If less than 50% bigger, then it still won’t be big.
Nope, two patties that are each 1/10th of a pound. The only thing that really makes it look big is the middle bun. The Grand Mac is 2 quarter pound patties.
The Big Mac is a legacy sandwich from before the days where any meal unfit for a Viking is considered laughable. It’s always had two 1/10 pound patties, the same size used in the (then much more popular) basic hamburgers and cheeseburgers. So it was twice as much meat (and 150% the bread) as the cheeseburger and legitimately “big” in comparison. Plus the extra toppings and heavier bun.
These days I assume the best selling burger is the Quarter Pounder so the Big Mac seems anemic in comparison from a meat perspective.
In 1967 - when it was introduced - the Big Mac was a pretty good sized burger. It was actually invented by a franchise owner to compete with comparable products at other restaurants, as McDonald hamburgers were being outsized by the competition.
A Big Mac meal with a regular drink has about a thousand calories, half of which is the Big Mac. That’s a big lunch. You simply do not need a thousand calories at every meal, unless you’re exercising a lot. However, everyone else is selling incredible amounts of food now so the Big Mac looks small by comparison. In the last couple of generations, portion sizes in North America have gotten grotesquely large.
It is certainly not popular like it used to be. It was different when it came along because of that middle bun and it seemed big in comparison. And has been said, portion sizes were much smaller then. And the catchy jingle didn’t hurt, either.
What we now consider a child’s portion was a normal adult portion in the 50s and 60s.
Cite please, I am under the impression that the Big Mac patty has shrunk over the years, thus the child sized portion you speak of would have included a larger beef patty back then and now it’s all a larger drink and fries but less beef.
I can’t find any evidence of that. McDonald’s, at least, claims to use the same size patty. Here they say it was definitely a 10-to-1 in 1982. I know it’s a site from McDonald’s itself, but I can’t find anything from a neutral source. From my memories, at least, of the 80s, the Big Mac does not seem any smaller than it was back then.
Nope. Granted, that’s from McDonald’s Canada but it’s always been a 1:10 patty. For sake of mechanical efficiency, the patty sizes have always been 1:10 for hamburgers, cheeseburgers (and variants) and the Big Mac and a quarter pound patty for the Quarter Pounder.
OK, here’s a snippet from Google Books from a 1961 issue of Time magazine, so pre-Big Mac days, that say a McDonalds hamburger patty was 1.6 oz back then.
So, I think that should suffice, unless you think they used different patties than their standard ones on the Big Mac when it first came out.
Googling around, I saw people suggesting that McD’s made the buns smaller in the 80s to make the meat look larger (in response to Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef?” campaign) which makes more sense, if true, than shrinking the patties from their standard.
A child’s portion now consists of a “regular” burger, and as others have already pointed out with cites, (thank you!) the “regular” burgers are the same then as now.
I would venture to say most American adults today wouldn’t consider that regular burger big enough, but it was obviously big enough for a an adult in the 1950s. And you have to take into account that the fries and drink sizes were smaller then, too since it was before all the biggie, mega, extra lingo.
When I was a kid, I loved the Bonus Jack from Jack In The Box. We ‘never’ went to McDonalds. The Bonus Jack was discontinued in the early-'80s. By then I was eating Carl’s Jr.'s Super Star With Cheese. Since Carl’s Jr. is almost 80 miles away, I rarely go there. Actually, I rarely eat fast-food burgers. But I do like the Big Mac when I want a Badburger. (Sometimes you just have to go with crap – like Jack In The Box’s tacos or Wienerschnitzel’s Chili Cheese Dogs.)
JITB did reintroduce the Bonus Jack for a short time nearly a decade ago. I had them a few times. They were not nearly as good as I remembered from childhood, and they were always dry as if the buns had been left out too long.
It did seem larger when it was wrapped in paper, surrounded by a cardboard ring and packaged in a cardboard box. It was just a tiny bit less complex than the gift wrap Rowen Atkinson was doing in Love Actually.