I wonder how many tomatos are slaughtered each year for use in McDonald’s restaurants…
On a (very slightly) more serious note, I seem to remember a McDonald’s near my hometown in NJ that didn’t put mustard on their standard cheeseburger. As a child I despised mustard, and I remember not needing to special order at one particular MickeyD’s. Anyone else recall this in their neighborhoods?
This is in referrence to both these articles:
McDonald’s column
Ketchup column
If you’ve ever spent the summers of your youth working around cows of the sort destined for meat patties, steaks, sausages and etc., you’d know that they are sort of like a fat encrusted walking celery. So in way, its like a favor to kill and eat them.
A proper hamburger consist of certain items only. They are 100% USDA grade “A” hamburger meat, tomato (sliced), onion (sliced, white type), dill pickle chips, lettuce (ice burg type) all installed on a toasted white bread hamburger bun dressed with mustard (the standard yellow kind). The hamburger “purity law” of 1517 mandates this as the description of a hamburger.
Yeah, I know folks put other stuff on there, like mayo, or 1000 island dressing, or ketchup. And stuff like sweet pickles, jalapenos (not bad thing), romaine lettuce, red or yellow onion. The lettuce might be shredded, the tomatos and onions diced along with some combination of a zillion of other ways or items and still call it a hamburger. Likewise there is a lot of drinks out there called beer that aren’t really beer. But does it really matter?
I think it’s standard in parts of the Northern NJ & nearby NY area to NOT put mustard on burgers, which is a disgusting thing to do, even to a lowly Mickey D’s. Of course to really be grossed out, go to Wendy’s where they will put MAYO and mustard on them unless you warn them to desist.
Flyfisher, you seem to be under some sort of delusion that iceberg lettuce is a food product. While I’ll admit that it’s passable as a decoration, it’s not even the best leaf for that job. If you’re going to be putting iceberg lettuce on a hamburger, why not styrofoam pellets in the shakes, too, while we’re at it?
And while I agree that a good burger ought to have mustard, why are you settling for the worst possible variety of mustard? For a good hamburger, the optimum is probably dijon, but a nice deli brown, or honey mustard, or (if you can get it!) ballpark mustard (which, incidentally, is God and Munincipal Field’s gift to hot dogs and similar sausages) would still be far superior to plain yellow.
Wendy’s around here actually puts ketchup, mustard, and mayo on the burgers, unless you state otherwise.
I worked at a Wendy’s for a whole two days. During that time, I learned the magic “white red green, white red green” theme to be applied to all hamburgers:
On the bun crown, mayo, ketchup, pickle, onion, tomato, lettuce. On the heel, mustard.
Oh crap… It took 18 years to get that damn rock music-video instructional tape and ceaseless singing of “White red green, white red green” over and over again. Now it’s BACK. :mad:
I grew up on the Jersey shore, so that makes sense then. I prefer my standard, run-of-the-mill burger to be without mustard, but I won’t ask for it without because it doesn’t bother me.
OTOH, mayonaisse is kryptonite for me. Even if it’s been scraped off the bun, I can still taste it. I’ll never eat a burger (or anything else for that matter), with mayo on it.
I recall visiting Maryland and seeing ‘sandwiches’ being advertised for what I would normally call a hamburger (poetic license of course when referring to McDonalds)
Is sandwich a Maryland thing, or comon throughout the US but generally ignored?
Ah, Chronos, I wasn’t meaning to suggest that anything (anything) connected with the construction of a hamburger, whether it the meat bit, lettuce bit, condiments bit or etc. was or should be considered food by anyone. Please for give if I gave that impression.
That said, I could tell you some stories from my days in engineering working on the design of control systems automated machinery for bakeries, meat packing places and the like. Once after a visit to chicken processing plant to bring up a test some new equipment that was installed there I developed a dislike for chicken (regardless of how prepared).
As for Micky Dee, they exert an enormous amount of control over their product so that it will be consistantly the same (some might say consistantly crappy) to their target market. The automated bakery equipment helps make it so. Now for Mayo.
We I was working at the same company we designed and built some automated equipment for whippin’ up the white goo know as mayo. As with the chicken, I have developed sort of a dislike for the stuff. Which is sort of a problem if you want to have a BLT to eat. So you might have guessed that a chicken salad sandwich has high probability of not being one of my menu choices at a sandwich shop.
We weren’t meant to see our food being prepared. It’s a ghastly sight. Far better to not know and eat than know and have to avoid all food. 
Properly prepared, you should be able to drink one-quarter to one-third of. No blood, though: salmonella appears on the surface of meat, and ground beef is nothing but surface, so cook them patties thouroughly, kids!
Chronos, have you tried a traditional style grainy mustard? Maille puts out a brilliant one called A l’Ancienne. Highly recommended.
Hopefully French-Embargo Fanatics will not have reached your local Deli.
To complete the sentence fragment above, just add these words:
a
hamburger
It’s easy! It’s fun! And it saves embarassment for the poster!
DOH!
I was taken aback when I learned Hardee’s special sauce was just ketchup, mustard and mayo mixed together.
You know, I don’t think I have. Thanks for the recommendation! I’ll have to see if my grocery store carries that.
Before the Great SDMB Winter I jokingly started a thread on bringing down Burger King by stealing their ketchup packets… Thankfully I printed out a copy of the spoof thread. Now I just gotta find it…
I am violently lactose intolerant (before you correct my phrasing, think of “explosive diarrhea” and whether that is violent or not). Occasionally I slip and don’t check stuff before I eat it.
McDonald’s cheese has absolutely NO effect on me. There is no lactose in it. I think even think it came from a cow.