Life's Pleasures Quote by Jim Cantalupo

McDonald's, in Jim Cantalupo's framing, isn’t selling lunch so much as it’s selling a social operating system. The menu roll call (hamburgers, chicken, veggie burgers, salads) is a corporate incantation meant to dissolve critique: whatever you think fast food is, we already contain its opposite. Health? We have salads. Choice? We have range. The point isn’t culinary; it’s rhetorical. “Broad range” functions like a moat around the brand, a way to make the company feel less like a monoculture and more like a mirror.

Then he pivots to the real product: prices and “the way we eat.” That phrase is doing heavy cultural work. It recasts McDonald’s from a restaurant into an infrastructure of daily life: predictable cost, predictable taste, predictable speed. He’s quietly arguing that the chain doesn’t just respond to consumer habits; it helps author them. In that worldview, criticism of McDonald’s becomes criticism of modernity’s tempo - commuting, time scarcity, families juggling schedules, the normalization of eating on the move.

The subtext is also defensive, and historically timely. Cantalupo led during an era when the company faced intensified scrutiny over nutrition, obesity, and globalization’s sameness. By shifting emphasis from ingredients to “the way we eat,” he relocates responsibility from the corporation to a broader cultural pattern - while still claiming ownership of it as a competitive advantage. It’s a savvy double move: absolve the menu, canonize the model.