The Issue: Whether the low cost-per-calorie of a McDonald’s McDouble makes it a good choice.
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Kyle Smith praises the McDouble as inexpensive nutrition (“The Greatest Food in Human History,” PostScript, July 28).
These burgers are loaded with chemicals and gross ingredients, including ammonium chloride and high fructose corn syrup in the bun, and antibiotics and hormones in the patty.
Smith also complains about activists who supposedly don’t care about hungry people. We have enough food and water to feed humans who are dying of hunger and thirst. Instead, this food and water goes to mass-produced, tortured, farmed animals.
All this and so much more, so McDonald’s can profit from chemical bombs known as McDoubles.James Scotto
Manhattan
If McBoiled Lentils had a billion-dollar advertising budget, government tax breaks and all the extra help McDonald’s has had in its history, you would be taking your kids to McBoiled Lentils.
Everything Smith wrote is based on dislike for foodies and natural vegan snobs. Fair enough.
But instead of a race to the bottom with regard to food prices, how about a race to the top with fair and living wages that would give the poor Smith loves so much an opportunity to buy the food they want and need?
Francisco Pena
Harlem
Smith is insane.
Anyone with functioning taste buds knows that Burger King’s Whopper Jr. embodies the perfect proportion of meat, bun, lettuce, tomatoes and condiments — mankind’s greatest achievement since the discovery of fire.
Gene Schwimmer
Manhattan
Are we so far behind in modern medicine that we don’t realize that there is more to nutrition than calories?
That McDouble sure looks delicious, but it’s a little meager. If you choose to double up, it’s 70 percent of the recommended daily intake of sodium, 60 percent of the recommended daily intake of fat, more than 80 percent of recommended saturated fat and almost half of the daily recommended cholesterol.
At the end of the day, these types of dietary decisions are the express lane to heart disease, diabetes, obesity, prostate cancer and mineral decay in bones.
The McDouble is part of the reason why ObamaCare has been thrust on Americans in the first place.
If more Americans made smarter nutritional choices and lived an overall healthier lifestyle, insurance rates would go down for everyone.
Michael Rosengart
Washington, DC
Maybe Smith was just kidding. It may have been a satirical piece that went over my head.
Everyone who likes eating fresh fruit must also wear a hand-woven Etsy backpack?
I enjoy eating fresh vegetables; they make me feel good. Does that make me a Marxist?
Is he really suggesting that eating at McDonald’s is better than eating something that is fresh and natural?
I understand completely that junk food is cheaper than healthy food. I wish it wasn’t the case.
Instead of highlighting income inequality and the effect it has on our nutrition, or finding ways to make quality nutrition accessible to all, he says we should just settle for whatever cheap, artificial substitute is in front of us.
Would he say the same for writers?Will Cefalo
Brooklyn
The author neglected to mention the fat content, which is always included in nutrition facts, but varies, depending on which nutrition Web site one visits.
Either way, I’ll stick with In-n-Out.
Pete Brittain
Tubac, Ariz.