Let us stipulate that both of these meals are equally unreal and equally unsustainable. Which is perhaps why we should do what a responsible social scientist would do under the circumstances: discard them both as anomalies or outliers—outliers of a real life. Or better yet, preserve them but purely as ritual, for the lessons they have to teach us about the different uses to which the world can be put. Going to McDonald’s would be something that happens once a year, a kind of Thanksgiving in reverse, and so would a meal like mine, as slow and storied as the Passover seder.
