Low and behold my hometown, Madison, WI, was listed at the #2 city for Fast Food spending per resident. Dang. There’s definitely a lot of fast food in Madtown, but for a city known for it’s liberal ideals and healthy, outdoor lifestyle, it was a bit shocking.

I won’t deny there’s a fair share of fatties in Wisconsin. Long winters, fatty food, and great beer are a recipe for plumpness. But Madison also has an incredibly fit population. Hell, they host an Iron Man every year. I’ve witnessed runners on Christmas morning training in a foot of snow. Practically all my family members that still live there have participated in at least one marathon.

Here’s my suspicion. It’s the college kids. 40K plus students, almost 25% of the population, makes for a lot of late night fast food visits. When I was in college there, both a Qdoba and a Chipotle opened within blocks of each other. Both were packed on a daily basis. The Qdoba would have 300 person lines at 3:00 morning Friday and Saturday night. That’s a lot of Federal Loan money getting pumped into fast food.

And…it’s Taco Tuesday!

Burger King’s delivery service, which was launched in the DC area in the fall of 2011, is currently expanding to the rest of the country. The service slaps a $2 delivery fee onto its regular prices and offers the full range of its menu items to any location within a 10-minute drive of participating stores. Burger King delivery hours vary from store to store, but typically begin after breakfast, from 11am (forget rubbery pancakes at your door) to 10pm (no luck for your late night munchies).

As the world’s second largest hamburger chain, Burger King hopes its delivery service will bump its famous flame-broiled recipe to the forefront of your fast-food cravings. Especially since McDonald’s convenience ends at drive-thrus and an extremely limited delivery service (exclusive to NYC-based business offices).

With a surge of online delivery websites, including GrubHub.com, Delivery.com, and Campusfood.com, offering a wide-variety of restaurants that deliver web orders to your door, why would you choose Burger King delivery? It requires an $8-$10 minimum purchase and an up-to-30 minute delivery wait, the delivery service defeats the whole point of fast food – fast food is supposed to be cheap and fast. Instead, why not order a fresh salad from your neighborhood Italian joint? Support your health, while supporting a local business.

Who knows whether this is a passing fad or the beginning of a major fast food milestone? Domino’s Spokesman Tim McIntyre is skeptical. “We wish them luck,” he says, “There is a reason that not all pizza places deliver: It isn’t easy.”

I stumbled on a banner add for Pizza Hut’s Ultimate Stuffed Crust Pizza while checking my Yahoo email for delivery coupons. The ad looked so enticing I decided to order.

As a child, Pizza Hut was my favorite. I loved that silly book club with the free Personal Pan Pizza’s after reading five books. It was about as close as my family ever got to going to a real restaurant. They seated you, you had wait staff, and even desert pizza. And the best part was that the food was actually good.

It’s been a slow decline for Pizza Hut. It started with the four years of indulging in the all-you-can eat Pizza Hut buffet on State Street in Madison. I rationalized it as “buffet” food. Of course it wasn’t as good as ordering it fresh. It only got worse when I moved to Chicago. Every pizza was worse than the last. This “Ultimate Stuffed Crust” was the final nail in the coffin.

The experience first when wrong with the online ordering process. The process lead me to believe that I was getting a large pizza with the “ultimate stuffed crust” and the same toppings on the pizza. This was in fact incorrect. I will admit to some of the blame here. This very well could have been operator error fueled by a hangover. However, it got worse. The order never officially took. It froze in the processing state, and I had to do something we’ve all become accustom to hating, speaking to a live human being on the phone while placing an order.

They had in fact received my order. You would think I would have been able to clarify exactly what I would be getting at this stage, but unfortunately, the Pizza Hut employee’s English was about as good as my Spanish, which is to say it was muy malo. He was a nice guy and I hate to fault him, but I had no idea what he said besides that he had received my order.

The pizza and my chicken wings arrived at a decent time, but that was the last good thing I have to say about my food. I wish I would have taken a few photos, but I was too appalled that I was going to put that monster in my body. So this is getting classified as From the Editor’s Desk and not an official review.

Anyway, first off, my pizza was not what I intended to order. It was an Ultimate Stuffed Crust pizza, but only cheese. I thought I was getting the same meat trio that was rolled up in the crust on the pizza itself. The pizza was slightly cold, salty as hell, and generally lousy. The crust was the best part, and that’s not saying much.

My chicken wings were just as bad. It looked like someone had baked a few wings and just squirted some pre-packaged sauce on top without bothering to mix it at all. The sauce was a dark reddish orange, not typical to your usual buffalo wing sauce. The wings were small and low quality.

Needless to say, I still ate the whole thing in one day. It was gross and I wish I could take it back. That was the last straw Pizza Hut. After a twenty plus year relationship, I’m calling it quits. Luckily Papa John’s is now back in Chicago.

I’m in a little bit of a moral quandary on what to do with this blog. It’s been a great learning experience, but I’m not sure if the subject matter is something I want to continue with.

Is anyone out there reading this? Is it worth continuing featuring news, ideas, and reviews? Or is there a better topic to start blogging about? Readers, let me know what you think.

I’m fuzzy on the beginnings of M Burger. Rumor has it, it was conceived in the back of one of the many Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises restaurants. The unlikely hooking up of a more traditional chef and his love of the lowly hamburger inspired what I was told was a truly great burger. I honestly haven’t been able to confirm if this story, especially with their simple and uninformative website.

It came to the point where I could no longer ignore the buzz. When I found out that M Burger’s second location was a mere blocks from my place of employ, I knew I had to make a stop for lunch.

The restaurant itself was tiny. About the size of a large city bedroom. (Well not that small, but you get the idea.) And it was packed with tourists, hip advertising types, and kacki-clad office workers. The decor is a modern with simple benches and tables crammed in. It had an open kitchen where you could see several busy workers making burgers.

The Menu:

I ordered the M Burger and fries. The M Burger consists of bacon, cheese and a “secret sauce”. The staff was courteous and fun, jabbing at my friend for change her order several times. However, the place was so packed we had to take our food to go.

The Burger was a pretty simple affair. Plain white bun, single patty,American cheese, lettuce, pickles, and “secret sauce”. The “secret sauce” tasted suspiciously like thousand island and another well known secret sauce. There was a generous covering of well-done bacon. It really reminded me of a single patty, bacon-topped, higher quality ingredient Big Mac.

The fries were shoestring, reminiscent of McDonald’s, but somehow tasted more natural. They were quite good. I was impressed with the size of the single, one size order of fries. There was more than enough fry for one dude.

What did I think? I was not that impressed. The burger was just OK. It tasted like your typical fast food burger, albeit with better ingredients. The fries were good, but not exceptional.

Will I be back? Yes. While the food wasn’t great, the prices were reasonable, and the environment and staff were fun and friendly.

-A vast expansion in the power of the FDA to regulate food
-Better overall food safety
-Slightly higher food costs

Yahoo! News breaks it down in more detail. I encourage you to give it a read.

• One of the opening factoids – “This year, Americas will spend more money on fast food than on higher education…” Wow.
• Colorado Springs as the primary setting. I’m intimately familiar with Colorado Springs. Two uncles and my dad all live there. I’ve visited twice this year. It’s definitely the kind of boom town, anywhere U.S.A. that is the perfect backdrop for a book about fast food.
• Scholesser covers the history and rise of fast food, from Carl Karcher to Walt Disney, Ray Croc, and the McDonalds brothers. A fascinating time in American history.
• The story of Elisa Zamot, a 16-year old McDonald’s worker in Colorado Springs
• Christopher Reaves speaking at a “Success” convention in Denver post-accident. His quote about success. “I see people who achieve these conventional goals…None of it matters”.
• The impact of the McNugget was so big that it changed the whole chicken industry.
• Hank, the independent cattle rancher from Colorado Springs. He took his life at 43 after struggling to keep his ranch open with pressures from the large meatpacking industry.
• A quote about the cleanliness of our kitchen sinks from remnants of contaminated meat from an University of Arizona microbiologist Charles Gerba “You’d be better off eating a carrot stick that fell in your toilet than one that fell in your sink”
• Kenny, a slaughterhouse worker who sacrificed his body for his meat packing employer. His story is both sad and comical. He was sliced in the back by a conveyor belt, had back surgery, suffered chlorine poisoning and spent a month in the hospital, got hit by a train, broke his leg stepping in a hole, and finally had a heart attack, all at work. And I complain about my job.
• “Eating in the US should no longer be a form of high risk behavior” – Eric Schlosser. Scary.

Overall, a very good read. I’d recommend any fast food eater to get a better understanding of what exactly we are putting into our bodies and the social and economic implications of these choices.