Splicetoday

Consume
Jul 24, 2009, 07:48AM

The Science of Eating

Why we love our McGriddles.

A few days ago, I had my first McGriddle. While I usually try to avoid McDonald's meat products - that's the benevolent influence of my wife, who rightly insists on eating humanely raised animal products - I was stuck in an airport and couldn't bear the idea of another yogurt parfait. The "standard" McGriddle consists of bacon, a brick of bright yellow egg and neon orange American cheese served between two small pancakes that have been injected with maple syrup (or some sort of maple simulacrum) so that they taste extremely sweet and yet aren't sticky to hold. The top of the griddle pancake is embossed with the McDonald's logo.Needless to say, the McGriddle is eerily delicious. If the human tongue has a secret password, then this sweet, salty and fatty breakfast sandwich is the code. The problem of course, is that all the deliciousness comes with a steep caloric cost: every McGriddle has 420 calories, 15 grams of sugar and 80 percent of the recommended daily allowance of cholesterol. As Elizabeth Kolbert recently described in the New Yorker, this preference for bacon wrapped in sweet pancakes is an unfortunate side-effect of human evolution:

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