On The Beach Blog

MadAve legend Jerry Della Femina and I share something in common, a weakness for the Sausage&Egg McMuffin™ found beneath most Golden Arches... but only before 10:30 am.

While I won't speak for Mr. Della Femina, one of the key features of the breakfast-wich, aside from its unabashed cheesy, sausagey good­ness, was its two for three bucks promotional price a while back.

But then, as with all good things, the fast-food giant having thoroughly addicted a sufficient number of people to that particular menu item, the promotion came to an end and the $2.39 per copy price was reinstated 24/7/365.

Boo! Hiss! And only my waist-line thanks you.

But it allowed me to re-institute my 36+ year boycott of the chain whose name I have not uttered, nor whose doorstep had I darkened since the corporation's CEO contributed $202,000 (in 1972 dollars) to CRP for an ex­emption from the Nixon Administration's Wage and Price Freeze.

But the television commercials were ubiquitous and they inexorably lured me back in to try a Sausage&Egg McMuffin™... well, at that price I took a flyer on two of'em... or $3.24 out the drive-through window.

O.M.G.! They were incredible... the perfect sausage, egg and cheese fix if one was out of range of Country Heroes Hungry Man handful!

Both my wife... who was still in capris and pedal-pushers during Watergate and therefore had minimal recollections of Richard Milhous Nixon... and I quick­ly signed on, but only for the duration of the 2/$3 promotion.

Having successfully weaned ourselves... weekly support meetings, daily stops at the Library Ave­nue farm stand for system-cleansing veg­gies, sausage-aversion therapy (hopeless in my case!)... I noticed my wife wincing when the latest breakfast-wich spots were playing since she's a sucker for a certain restaurant chain's biscuits.

So this week while on business across the Plains I stopped beneath the Riverside Golden Arches and picked up a pair of "Southern-Style Chicken Biscuits."

The good news is that it was easy to eat just one, so the second one made it back to West­hampton Beach intact.

Overall we were less-than-whelmed... a chunk of de-bone fried fowl in a plain ol' biscuit. No seasoned gravy, no cheese, nothin'!

Then I applied some of my celebrated critical-thinking skills and wondered how the fast-food behemoth could offer such as dandy item as a Sausage&Egg McMuffin™ with all it's tasty ingredients for the same prices as the ordinary ol' chicken biscuit.

The conclusion was inescapable, and a sinking realization stunned me as the words of Otto von Bismarck thundered in my brain:

"To retain respect for laws and sausages, one must not watch them in the making."

Sausages could be made of any ol' ground-up left-over stuff, Gefilte fish for the gentiles! Un­sold burgers and what-not! A brilliant applica­tion of the Zero Waste Management concept.

That'll get me back on Weight-Watchers.