It’s become a synonym – the prototype, an American icon – for junk food.”
Marion Nestle, a New York University nutrition and public health professor, wrote in an email: “The Big Mac has had an enormous influence on American – and international – eating patterns, not all to the good alas. (A follow-up spot featured people struggling to master the tongue-twister.) The inescapable jingle mirrored the essential excess of the Big Mac itself, making one word of its ingredients – “twoallbeefpattiesspecialsauce- lettucecheesepicklesonionsona-sesameseedbun” – and daring people to pronounce it. President Bill Clinton, the onetime burger devourer in chief, was known to indulge his “Big Mac Attack,” as one memorable advertising campaign described such cravings.ĭelligatti’s creation, a sensation from the start, was the subject of a legendary advertising campaign in 1974. The Big Mac has been called the “Elvis of sandwiches,” the “Paul Bunyan of hamburgers.” It’s the solid-food equivalent of Coca-Cola, a totem of consistency instantly recognizable from western Pennsylvania to India, where cows are considered sacred by the nation’s Hindu population and where the Big Mac is made with mutton or chicken and called the Maharaja Mac. 28 at 98, created the sandwich in 1967 at a McDonald’s franchise near Pittsburgh, it has been the flagship item of the global fast-food chain, selling more than a half-billion servings annually in the United States alone. Neither the humpbacked 747 nor the cherry-red public buses that crisscross London surpass the Big Mac as the world’s most famous double-decker.