What's Eating Me?

I live in the Culinary Sodoman Gomorrah, or at the very least like the culinary Lilliput or Brigadoon, where one only has to think of food and one will be tempted by the fancies and concoctions that have brought a million to their collective gustatory doom. Some people think I am referring to New Orleans and their many lively and cantankerous chefs, but this is a place far more sinister and also cleaner, but therein lies the true threat. Not in being slightly cleaner, mind you, but in the fact that you would probably be fooled by that state of seeming immaculacy into thinking that it would be ok to eat here. You would be wrong. So very wrong.
I am not a foodee, or a gourmand, or whatever the kids like to call it these days, what is it, ah yes, a fatlard. With cheese. I frequently tell myself that I do not need to eat "that", where that refers to the copious amounts of food of varying types that are frequently foisted off on the American consumer. Usually I am right, although there have been times when I've gotten dizzy and later awakened with somebody telling me that I do actually need to eat sometimes. Stupid mortality. Sometimes I hit my head and then I forget things. I want a pony.
In the olden days, whether you were a pilgrim or a cowboy, you pretty much only ate one thing. Pilgrims ate turkey and maize, and cowboys ate, well, cows, with the occasional rattlesnake. This was known as the Atkins diet. Even farther back than cowboys and pilgrims, people ate whatever they had on hand and so it was until mankind derailed the natural order with his destructive desire for variety. That was the day cross country truckers were invented. These noble and mystical creatures allowed food from places other than your house to be transported to your house where it will be consumed by you. Unfortunately, as usual, tampering with nature didn't seem to be all that bad an idea at the time. It was decided that if new food was good, even more new food was even better. The imminent danger became more... closer.
Irregardless, the beginning of the end began with a man named Roy Franchise. Roy, a small boy growing up in Detroit, Idaho, was an Armenian orphan with big dreams. These enlarged dreams were a serious life-threatening medical condition, for which he was often mocked by the other children. These dreams also had nothing to do with his talent for getting other people to sell food for him, which at the time was completely unheard of, and so they are completely irrelevant to this story. Some people might call the dreams "super-sized", but that is both stupid and also out of keeping with the touching nature of this rags-to-riches-to-morbid-obesity tale and not only that, but also we already moved on, so shut your stupid face! What Roy started made people believe that they could pay a fee for a license and then sell food under the guise of a huge, evil, faceless corporation, thereby discouraging lawsuits through political clout and assassination. And don't forget that big companies get grade F meat dirt cheap.
Eventually, heavy hitters emerged in the "face stuffing with all kinds of food" game. Establishing dominance became their single-minded goal in the Fast Food Wars, a military conflict that would leave its marks on the psyche of the world. The greats rallied around their mighty generals, be they colonels like Kentucky Fried Chicken's secretive Ike Sanders or Elvises's evil Lars Parker, ace fighter pilots like Wendy's Dave Thomas, or even Standard Issue Army Clowns like that Burger King Idiot but not Ronald McDonald, who was never in the army and may have actually been a draft dodger. To achieve their ends, a cruel strategy was formed: give people more sub-grade meat with gristle fillers for their pittance and you steal their hearts. Of course, those hearts would be enlarged like Roy Franchise's dreams and liable to explode all over you in splattered cholesterol drippings, but we're not talking about literal hearts anyway. After years of this "super-sizing", the meals couldn't get any larger and the fast food powers-that-be faltered. Their mighty conflict ground to a halt, their giant war machines lay in shambles on the fields. They were simply out of ideas.
In my own home town, restaurant saturation is at maximum capacity. It is well known that the only pastimes available here involve eating, gnoshing, nibbling, gorging, munching, gulping, shoveling, and the dreaded "snorkeling". For that very reason, the fast food corporations use this place for a testing grounds, sending their very best and worst ideas here to mix in a frothy medley. From experimentally placing a McDonald's inside every rival restaurant, gas station, and household, to inventing whole new countries from which to draw ethnic foods for their menus, we get overrun daily with dangerous levels of fast food madness. Nothing, however, could have predicted the next desperate, horrific turn that would be taken.
It may have been Hitler who first authorized trained Austrian-Hungarian sadists to develop something known as "der burstengluten", which roughly translated into German and then back into English means "death from overeating at some kind of horrific uber buffet until killed". Flash forward to two months ago, when corporate archeologists unearthed the findings of these sadists and implemented them in an effort to buoy their flagging industry. Every restaurant went from a supersized eatery to a mechanized force-feeding trough in under twelve minutes. For $5.95 you can have your girth rolled into a feeding bin and your own personal pig farmer will work feverishly to load all of his livestock into the machine that is lovingly referred to as "Mr. McSlurry", where it will then be prepped and crammed at high speed into your gullet, compressing non-vital organs and allowing you to achieve "hyper satiety", otherwise known as "ultimate gastrointestinal transcendence".
In the end, there is no escape. One must fall to Mr. McSlurry one way or another. He's coming to your town, like some sort of grisly Santa Claus, only with a grinder in place of a belly like a bowl full of jelly and a long, heavy duty conveyor belt with feeding sluice instead of a corn cob pipe and button nose. This is only a staging area, and the battle goes badly for us, the normals. There has been a report of one individual, one of many soon to come, with body fat exceeding 1200%. Cholesterol levels are now being tabulated by NASA. The challenge has been issued, to join the Portly Maurauders or be crushed under their raw tonnage. So the next time you see a delightfully whimsical and yet inscrutably named fast food chain's mascot, don't resist the urge to kill them. That's right, you can strike a blow for freedom... the freedom to resist appetite, to wear pants that don't stretch, to wash your back without using a rag on a stick.