An investigation into McDonald's chips

A seven-year-old needs to know "why are they so tasty?"

My son Ronnie AKA Ham has dreams of being a reporter. And a classical pianist. And a composer. And a Youtuber. And a McDonalds worker. And he wants to be in a Queen tribute band. As a parent I do my best to try to support those dreams. So I’ve told him I’ll help him with interviews.

We discussed how to do an interview. Generally you have a question first, something you need to know. Something you think the public need to know. Then you find a subject matter expert, then you come up with some questions that you hope will answer your big question…then it’s fairly straightforward from there.

His question was immediate and urgent: Why are McDonalds chips so tasty?

Ronnie doesn’t like food much. In his words - food is “complicated”. But McDonalds Chips are almost always uncomplicated. “Except when they’re cold which is very upsetting”. McDonalds chips stay the same mostly. They don’t surprise you.

In our house McDonalds chips are our go-to. When nothing else works - McDonalds chips will. This is pretty common in households where there’s Autism, pediatric feeding disorders, and/or Avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder. Basically, if you know you know. If your cupboard is full of one type of Up & Go or one type of cracker - you know.

I love McDonalds chips because they almost never fail my child (except when they’re cold). Yes, I’ve tried to replicate the chips in every way, even putting them in a McDonalds packet - but he always knows. We are at peace with this.

Actually, we’re more than at peace with it. We celebrate it. We are grateful and happy he has a food that feels safe and makes him happy. We have thought a lot about food since we had him and our whole attitude toward food has changed. We recognise now that food can just be fuel, that food is neither good nor bad, that eating isn’t easy….And not every child or person has hunger signs.

Pediatric feeding disorder (PFD) is described as “impaired oral intake that is not age-appropriate and is associated with medical, nutritional, feeding skill, and/or psychosocial dysfunction”. Conservative evaluations estimate that PFD affects more than 1 in 37 children under the age of five in the United States. We have no real data about what stats are in Aotearoa.

We often think eating is easy, but it is only an instinctive drive in the first month of a child’s life. From birth to three to four months of age, we have a set of primitive motor reflexes like rooting, sucking, swallowing. These help us eat. Between the end of the fifth or sixth months of life, these reflexes “drop out” and eating is essentially a learned motor behavior after six months of age.

Eating involves every muscle in the body. One swallow takes 26 muscles and six cranial nerves to coordinate. According to food specialists, “there are 25 steps for typically developing children and 32 steps or more for children with feeding problems, in the process of learning to eat”.

So, you can see why we celebrate McDonald’s chips or Thickest of the Thick chips, or Up&Go banana flavour.

Back to Ronnie’s big question. We asked a McDonald’s worker Teeth to answer his questions. I hope you will enjoy the answers as much as we did.

Ronnie: Why are McDonalds chips so tasty?

Teeth: “I think the salt on them makes them pretty good, but I’d say it’s probably how they’re made that makes them so tasty.”

Do you get to eat as many chips as you want?

“Unfortunately not, but we do get to have them for pretty cheap after our shifts and the managers can get them for free.”

Is it the best job in the world to make McDonalds chips?

“It’s pretty fun, out of all the different jobs I do at McDonald’s, making fries is my favourite out of all of them.”

How do you make McDonalds chips?

“I’m not quite sure how they get from potato to chip, but in the store we get the fries out of an automatic fry hopper that has a little button on it so we can put a fry basket under the hopper and get frozen fries, then we put it in the hot oil and push a button that starts a timer, once the timer goes off the fries are cooked, then we take them outta the fryer and pour them on a metal table thing with a heat lamp above them (so they don’t go cold) then we put salt on them and put them in the fry containers they come in, then whoever is packing the order grabs whatever size they need.”

Sometimes McDonalds chips are not good. What happens when they’re not good?

“Typically the boxes of frozen fries are swapped out regularly to make sure they’re all kept as fresh as possible, but sometimes they can taste a little less good because they’re left in the oil a little too long or left under the heat lamp too long, but we try to make sure they all get an even amount of time in the heat before they’re sent out.”

Is it noisy working at McDonalds?

“It is rather noisy, most the machines make different noises for different reasons, such as the fries oil vat makes a beeping noise when the fries are done cooking and the chicken oil vats make the same noise, there’s also a bit of yelling, but that’s just cause sometimes the sounds of the cooking and machines are a bit to loud to hear each other over.”

What is your favourite smell at McDonalds? Mine is chips.

“Sometimes when I work in the barista area some coffees smell really really good, like a hazelnut cappuccino I made today, although when I work on the fries I do end up really hungry cause they smell so good.”

McDonalds is very tasty. Thank you for working at McDonalds and making me chips.

“It is pretty fun to work at and I always love it when people are happy with the food :D”

Do you think McDonalds chips are the best in the world?

“They’re pretty good, very good texture :D and taste”.

So there you have it. Stay tuned for Reporter Ronnie’s next big question. Which really could be about anything.