Disturbing sign of the apocalypse #437

So, we picked Joey Actually-My-Name-is-Simon, and headed Team Combs over to McDonald's in Shelbyville. While in McD's, I noticed the fry assembly line: At one end, close to the drive-thru window is the holding area, where crisp, deep fried potatoes sit under a heat lamp in red McDonald's packages awaiting customers.

To the right of that is the deep fryer, the heart of America's burgeoning artereosclerotic crisis, where hyrdogenated vegetable oil at God-knows-how-hot fries the rather-uniform Taters as they sit in baskets. The fryer's apparently run by a digital timer, set each time a basket lowers into the oil.

All pretty mundane, the height of Fast food efficiency...

...and then, we see that efficiency, amp'd-up to eleven



To the right of the fryer was a machine that had a hopper at the top, a diagonal line of the fryer baskets below the hopper, and a mysterious empty space below the line above, perpendicular to the top. To my horror, I saw a girl dump 5 bags of frozen fries into the hopper, and then the machine proceeded to make its purpose known...

IT LOADED THE FRIES INTO THE BASKETS.

Yep, McD's built an entire machine to homogenize pouring frozen fries into wire baskets.

Wow.

This one of many times i've felt bad about getting rid of my camera-phone. Couldn't believe this thing.

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