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As a Libertarian and a Fortean, I believe everyone should make their own decisions. But if I held the lever that would rid the world of the Big Mac, I would pull it. It's not that the Big Mac is the only damaging item on the McDonald's menu. From its crotch-melting coffee to its Filet O' Fish that could survive an Ice Age unchanged - or its apple pie that seems the product of nuclear fission - Mickey Dees has been a purveyor of wretchedness for too many years and its hold upon the world is only growing stronger.

It's time to let the Big Mac fall into the realm of legend because North America has become a vast cellulite sculpture garden, and the Big Mac has been one of the primary sculptors. Our DNA has been forever altered by the Big Mac. World history may well have been changed by this banal evil - we might have a cure for cancer or diabetes by now if some Big Mac-scarfing lout hadn't belched out loud at a particular moment in an airport terminal while a daydreaming scientist sat in chair behind him, contemplating, in the final, imaginative throes of creating a workable anti-dote to death, when his concentration was demolished by the Philistine's oral flatulence.

Fat is stored energy. With this in mind, is it too far-fetched to hypothesize that the Big Mac might have been created by an alien intelligence for the sole purpose of turning people into human batteries? Maybe we are a world of Duracells and our extraterrestrial puppeteers are soon to return and reap their harvest installing countless legions of us under the vast hoods of their spaceships, so they can jet off to some other part of the universe in order to get down to their real work.

Or, possibly, the Big Mac was bestowed upon the world by the Angel Gabriel as a test from God. Since humanity failed so miserably with the apple, according to the Bible, maybe we were given a second chance with the Big Mac. Knowing this time our propensity for eating, possibly humankind was set to attain some kind of collective enlightenment when the 100th Big Mac was imbibed . . . and that enlightenment promptly slipped away into oblivion when the 200th and the 1000th and 100,000th Big Macs were hurled down the throats of the ravenous rabble.

Since a large segment of the population enjoys Big Mac with such a special lust, it's a wonder we've never gone through a Big Mac Prohibition, in which bath-tub Big Macs were made in shady tenements and sold to the insatiable in speakeasies.

The Big Mac should go the way of absinthe, opium and laudanum, relegated to the pantheon of vices, remembered fondly by the law-abiding, and covertly consumed by those who dwell in the underworld.

Learn more about this author, Matt St. Amand.
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