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Happy Now? Do McDonald’s New Adult Happy Meals Tap Nostalgia, or Coddle Perpetual Infants?

Is this a delightful callback to a more innocent age, or an attempt to coddle perpetual infants who long for their binkie, their blankie and their Hamburglar figurine? 

Happy Now? Do McDonald's New Adult Happy Meals Tap Nostalgia, or Coddle Perpetual Infants?

McDonald’s now offers adult Happy Meals, and they’re a huge hit. It’s actually a Big Mac (or 10 chicken nuggets), drink and fries in a Cactus Plant Flea Market box, the streetwear company that also designed the included toy surprise.

Is this a delightful callback to a more innocent age, or an attempt to coddle perpetual infants who long for their binkie, their blankie, and their Hamburglar figurine? 

Alfonzo Rachel and Bill Whittle create two new episodes of The Virtue Signal each week, analyzing current events in light of lasting values. Our Members, not only nostalgic for a more innocent age but eager for a better future, support this work with their money. Memberships start at $9.95/month, and when you give more, you help ensure that thousands of people will hear a message they don’t elsewhere. Just tap the big green button above to become a Member.

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32 replies on “Happy Now? Do McDonald’s New Adult Happy Meals Tap Nostalgia, or Coddle Perpetual Infants?”

I’m actually surprised it took this long for this to happen. All you see whenever you go out in public is “adults” still wearing their pajamas in the grocery store. They love to wear comic book/super hero/anime T-shirts, and play video games. They always have their faces glued to their phone for every possible second, and can’t look a “normal” adult in the eye and carry-on a conservation.
It’s pathetic, plus Mickey-D’s food sucks, so more power to them.

Wow, C-Rats … That brings back memories. I haven’t seen those in ages, not since this MRE stuff replaced them. We used to trade and barter and save the components and every bit of it was pretty horrible. Except the smokes, which were always welcome. Some of the hard candy wasn’t bad. The powdered beverages were gack but they made water with purification tabs in it drinkable. (Ever notice how ‘dry’ warm purified water from a plastic canteen seems to taste?)

Ok, truth be told there were some meals I liked more than others, some that were not so bad. You could get creative but even then you just ended up with different glop compared to the original glop.

When I was in the Middle East we used to trade for anything that had pork in it with the Israelis who couldn’t eat swine. Sometimes we could get to the chow resupply before they did and we’d snatch up everything but the pork stuff. Then blackmail them for ammo if they didn’t want to eat hog. As in …

“I’ll give you a spaghetti and meatballs, chicken and noodles, turkey loaf, spicy beef or any other mystery meat not pig for a ham and eggs or pork and beans or ham and beans etc. — PLUS a belt of 7.62 and three bandoleers of 5.56. You guys got bigtime ammo, get off some of it. No? Eat pig. Use the radio when you get hungry. Bye.”

Then in an hour, two or three I’d hear someone calling “Frostbite” on the radio, that’s me —

“Frostbite, Frostbite, this is ___. How copy? Over.”
“___, Frostbite. Read you 5×5. Your dime, transmit. Over.” (Well skip the lingo now.)
“How about one belt 762 and two bandoleers 556?”
“Sure, if you throw in no less than 5 cans of peaches, no substitutes and you hump your ass over here for the transaction.”
“Gotta check if we have peaches.” (pause) “Sorry, only 3 peaches.”
“Then three more cans of any fruit plus at least 5 sweets, your choice.”
“Roger that Frostbite, can do. Don’t shoot my mule on his way in. His mom will find you and make matzo ball soup out of your gonads.”
“Roger on the gonad soup gobbling Hebrew Momma. Call when her boy departs, Frostbite out.”

Loved those guys, miss those days. We really were a lot more friendly to each other than you’d think if you listened to the radio chatter. Those boys had their stuff wired together tight.

I always carried some Tapatio or Tabasco that I either brought along or someone had sent me so that made it a lot more tolerable. Then everything just tasted like Tapatio or Tabasco. Usually had some dried cayenne powder also. Stings like crazy in wounds too, but it slows or stops the bleeding because of the capsicum. Great coagulant if you don’t happen to have anything better handy. Even if you do, depends on how much you like the guy who’s bleeding.

Of course you can always use the cayenne for seasoning too, if no one happens to be bleeding.

Did my time in Nam. Remember well C-rats and all the sniveling and complaining I did, but I, all of us, ate them. Was retired (medically) when MREs came along, but worked at 29 Palms and a number of other bases, and managed to pick up various iterations of MREs. Have yet to find one as versatile as the old Charlie rats.
A few years ago began planning a 2.5-3 month camping trip “around the U.S.” Shopped for MREs, camp foods, etc. Found Amazon and a few other places had access to new, fresh rations from places like Russia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, Italy, Spain, China, Korea, Japan and Australia. Began stocking up on some of them just of kicks/education, then along came covid.
At 78 now, and having survived the plandemic but still slowed down a bit, I’m doubting I’ll be making that trip, so began “testing” other nations rations. All the Asian are mostly noodle, varying degrees of heat. The Japanese was best, with some variety. Russian and that area are all really tasty, a lot of food, tho a bit greasy. I’m guessing they need that extra layer of fat for the climate they live in. German were good, Italian ok. They have one ration, probably reserved for “O”s that had a cordial (alcohol) packed in it. Spanish were ok, as were the those from Central and South America. Didn’t do Israeli because they were all packet for units, as opposed to individual meals.
The meals I got from Great Britain were geared more toward their Sikh population, vegetarian and Halal. Really not half bad, but as a steady diet with no meat (pork) ??? Couldn’t take that. Lots of chickpeas, beans, veggies and spices.
Wish I would have photoed some of those so I could show them.
There are a lot of videos testing/tasting MREs but this is my personal fave:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Vv662T2610

From your description it sounds like some, or a lot, of those meals meant for troops in the field are heavily loaded with carbs. Carbs are fine for energy but you need proteins to fix/replace damaged and aging cells. You tend to damage a lot of cells in the strenuous environment of bullet weather. So that’s an interesting insight into those places that think noodles, chickpeas, etc. are enough for a fighting man to get by on.

Sorry to hear that The Coof canked your trip. It’s a bummer at this stage of life (I’m younger than you but pretty beat up) to miss an opportunity like that. Another one may not come around again. No fault of your own but a good lesson for everyone else not to put something off you want to do, who’d have ever thought that something like Covid would come along and create the mess it has? Worse yet, the mess being amplified by political incompetents and I’m being nice by letting them off that easy.

I’ll check out that link in a bit and thanks for the information.

Semper Fi.

In the summer of ’74 I was lucky enough to spend almost 3 weeks in Australia during a combined US/AUS/NZ “war game.” Because of some import restrictions on meat products, the Marines couldn’t bring along their C-rats; instead, we got the Australian field rations, which took some getting used to. The ration box included a full day’s meals instead of the one-meal-per-box C’s. The Aussie chow was actually pretty good, especially the mutton. The coffee had enough caffeine to revitalize a 3-day old corpse, the survival biscuit was more like shredded wheat and made a decent breakfast meal with a little of the reconstituted milk, and the hard candies were great. (Or just everyone in the squad open up all of their cans and dump the contents into a steel helmet, along with most of a bottle of Tabasco, for one heckuva helmet stew.) Ahhh, life in the field….
I still carry the can opener on my key ring.

Would have liked to be with you on that trip, Dan. I did get a few bits and pieces of Auzzi rations. Loved the idea of the tubed milk. Many Euro rats have that, too. There was one thing in a squeeze tube, can’t remember what it was called, but it took more than just a little getting used to.
Other than that, I’d eat them again. What has really hurt our American rats is the move to keep Mother Earth clean. No cans, no waste, etc. Personally, I never knew anybody in military who had any issue carrying out their trash. Of course, we were all trained that anything left behind was a clear signal to the bad guys who was there, how many of us their were, and where we were going. From that they could deduce targets and gear we were carrying. I thing most of the damage done to mother earth was done by civilians who never got the word “bring it in, take it out.”

I have no doubt that some McD marketing folks found that some of their customers would purchase “Adult Happy Meals”.
The reason I don’t doubt this is that for more than a generation, there have been “parents” who thought that the job of parent was to raise “good kids”. They missed the point that their job was to raise up adults who could adapt to a changing world.
So now we have a multitude of adult-aged children who not only think frequenting fast food is great, but are willing to buy a Happy Meal for themselves, as if the packaging matters more than the food.
This is an act of a child. That they are old enough to qualify as “adult” is merely due to the passage of time. They are still children.
Oh, and if you want an Adult Happy Meal, I am ok with that, too. Helps to identify the children among us.
Hot Tip for those who stop at FF places on car trips. Drive past the FF place and stop at a local diner or some such. It will be quick enough and better and probably cheaper. The rest room will be cleaner as well.

Yeah, I prefer to sit down at a diner, restaurant or cafe over grabbing something at the drive through too but …

That’s not always doable. It’s not nearly as quick as swooping through the drive through, having a bag of slop tossed at you and getting back on the road to eat the slop while you drive. If you say it’s “quick enough” to be comparable then you must be parking, going in and ordering, then sitting there at the slop shop to eat. I pretty much never do that so yeah, if that’s what you mean you really ought to have just found a decent place to eat.

My Dad had the same attitude towards fast food as you do. He hated to eat on the go and pretty much never did. One time I had made reservations at a fishing resort ‘up North’, I was driving and we were trying to get there before dark. It’s a lot easier to do luggage and fishing gear in the daylight and being as we were paying for that night anyway every minute later we got to the resort was a minute we didn’t get to go fishing.

Dad was diabetic and he was hungry. That’s not good. So I asked him where he wanted to eat, fast food or somewhere we could sit down? He begrudgingly said “We’re in a hurry so … fast food”. We swooped, had the slop tossed at us and were back on the road in less than 10 minutes. That’s ten miles less than we would have travelled had we not stopped but a LOT less than if we’d taken 45 minutes or more to find a sit down eating place, ordered, been served, eaten, paid, used the can and got back on the highway ASAP.

(Turns out swooping is about the exact same amount of time as stopping to use the facilities at a rest area. I know this from decades of experience.)

We got our slop from McDonalds. By the time we’d finished our burgers, fries and drinks Dad had a huge mess down his shirt and in his lap; grease, bits of fry, burger, lettuce, tomato, sesame seeds and the bun etc. I didn’t so much as have a tiny bit of lettuce on me. I was driving so he had all the room and time he might need to eat. Dad was amazed at the mess he had made and the mess I had not made. He asked me …

“How’d you do that?”

I said “Lots of practice.”

We got to the resort and had about an hour to fish. We’d have only had about 15 minutes or less if not for the rapid slop stop which wouldn’t have made it worthwhile to get in the boat and make the effort. Sometimes you just gotta get your priorities straight, I’d rather fish than sit down for a meal if that’s the choice. If I can do both, that’s even better but I did say “choice”.

At the end of the day, fast food isn’t really good food, it’s almost not food at all. More like fuel than food so it would probably be more appropriate to call it “fast fuel”. If you’re in a hurry, if you have better or more important things to do than relax and enjoy a meal — fuel will have to suffice.

There’s a Cracker Barrel here that serves good food at a reasonable price competitive to the prices at the McDonalds across the street. The Cracker Barrel has seen a lot more of my patronage than the McDonalds has, by a factor of 20x or more. They’re on the same street right next to each other, right off the freeway a dozen or so miles from my house. It’s rare that I would stop to eat away from home and when I do I don’t care about the time it takes. It’s a dozen miles to home no matter how long I sit down and eat.

But I’m also not one to turn my nose up at people fuel when the speed and ease of sliding down the off ramp, swooping through a drive through and sliding back up the on ramp gets me where I want to be quicker. When I’m on the road I’m going someplace, whatever someplace that might be. If I stop I’m counting the miles I’m not travelling so the less stopping the better. I’ve driven at least a couple million miles in my life, miles are miles are miles. The sooner I get done with them the happier I am and the sooner I can get to doing something I actually want to, or have to do. Neither road nor airway skies hold much joy for me anymore, they’re just the conduit to where I’m going*.

Unless I’m just travelling for pleasure which I almost never do. Then the pleasure of the travel and the pleasure of a good meal compliment each other.

*(Though I really enjoy taking my boat out on the water, that’s not really ‘travelling’. Also I think I’d really enjoy a nice train trip, it’s been decades since I was on a train. In neither case is fast food really a consideration.)

When I was in an on the road, visiting clients with reps, I had gotten into the FF habit. Now, my road travel is usually a vacation thing. I always pack the vehicle the night before so we can get out early. Mrs Ron will pack snacks for the car and frequently lunch. But stopping for me is never a quick thing. I do all the driving (yes, I am that guy) but have back and hip and knee issues. So when I stop, I need to stroll a bit just to loosen up so that I can cramp up again.
We have taken Aamtrak a couple of times and I much prefer that. in fact we are planning soon an trip out west by rail with stops. Going to do the sleeper car a couple of times and pretend we are Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint. Hopefully in the next couple years once Ronette is settled somewhere.
As an aside, a couple years before the world stopped I decided to lose some weight. Biggest thing I did was stop going to FF with coworkers 1 to 2 times per week.
It is not intended to be a frequent thing. I think that is when I realized a typical “meal” is like 1500 calories.

Yeah, I’m pretty much in the same place these days except I don’t even go on vacation trips anymore. Usually the furthest I go is Nelson County.

As I’ve mentioned before, one of my buddies has a ‘cabin’ in Nelson County. ‘Cabin’ is a short way of saying 4 bedroom log home on 30 acres with a mind blowing bass pond.

He is a big fan of train trips. He and his wife did the vagabond thing last year going from here to the West Coast and back, buying a Pullman sleeper when tenting or hotels were not convenient. They love that sort of thing and got me interested too.

I think I could handle a vacation like you’re talking about if I could afford it. I get a decent check in a couple years so if I’m still alive and don’t blow it all on a boat I might do that. I can’t walk anymore for spit but sitting in an observation car with a book and some good whiskey watching all the scenery that I have been hitherto too busy driving to really look at — Sounds very appealing.

I’ve never bought a Happy Meal in my life. Even when my kids were little. The kids never even asked me to and if they had I might have gotten them one but they didn’t ask.

We don’t seem to have the information that McDonalds relied on to make the marketing decision to offer adult Happy Meals. So the reason behind the offering is speculation. For all I know they surveyed some people who said that they would buy an adult Happy Meal for themselves if they were buying regular Happy Meals for their kids at the same time.

I just can’t dig up a lot of interest in this topic. Though I watched and enjoyed the video even so.

What I particularly enjoyed in this video is Zo saying repeatedly “I’m OK with that.”

I am so tired of phoney outrage and nitpicking bile I could just puke. It’s good to hear someone say “I’m OK with that.”

Some of this stuff is just normal, natural cultural change. When I was a kid my parents HATED my “long hair music” with a purple passion. In later years that music would appear as background or theme music in a movie or TV show we were watching together and I’d say something like “Pretty good music, huh?” They would respond in the positive. And I would say …
“Yeah, I’ve been listening to that song/group for decades. It’s the music you claimed to despise when I was a teenager.”

It was good music back then and it’s good music now, so what changed?

My parents stopped thinking of it as counter culture to their own culture and actually heard the music without the attitude. That’s what changed.

One of the hazards of growing old is anger. I don’t know why this is but it is. I know a lot of older people that are perpetually angry about something or other. They’re not doing any good and only hurting themselves.

When you look around at our world today, think a little bit about what you’re seeing. If it’s an ephemeral cultural issue that will likely as not pass with the next generation try to keep that in perspective.

It’s not that there is nothing to be angry about. Cutting up kids to ‘trans’ them is a good example. That might be a cultural issue but the effect is permanent and detrimental to those who practice that particular abomination. That’s just one example and there are many others.

It’s important to focus your wrath on things that actually merit that wrath. It’s also important to know the difference between things that do and things that don’t. Chill a bit, take a deep breath and really think about what’s making you so angry if you’re one of those angry old people.

I always hated the happy meals for my kids because they were done with the toy by the time we got home, but I wasn’t allowed to throw them away.

Paul is the person who wrote most of the New Testament. Zo is quoting the Bible, and in particular, one of Paul’s letters which are a big part of the New Testament.

Since movies got quoted below I thought I’d fish out the whole quote, since I think the character Cereal Killer also quoted it in Hackers…

1 Corinthians 13:11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.
https://www.biblehub.com/esv/1_corinthians/13.htm (for reference)

Of course, I know who the Apostle Paul is. My real name is actually Apostolos and I was named after Paul. However, when Zo mentioned him, it just didn’t register with me that that was the Paul he was referring to. I guess he said it with such familiarity, that I thought he was referring a friend or relative that he had introduced on an earlier show. Boy, was I off on that one!

When I heard about this marketing ploy I wasn’t surprised. Infantilizing Americans is one more piece in the stratagem of the left. Who needs to be taken care of? Babies and children. Enough said.

I’ll buy a kids happy meal sometimes because I want less food, and I want the toy, which I give my granddaughter or a kid in the Sunday school. But I don’t need a hamburger in a special box to make me happy.

Totally agree! I always get the childs combo at the movies because it is the right amount and I don’t want to share someone else’s taste in salt and butter.

But then it would be Taco Bell, because after the restaurant wars all restaurants are Taco Bell. 😉

Taco Bell. McDonalds. All of their fare is as Brother Bob has described below — otherwise known as alley cat meat in sauce. Yum.

Totally agree – the food is terrible. Back when my son was little, we did quite a bit of traveling, and Happy Meals were a part of that. Usually, my son only ate a few bites of the hamburger and fries, because the silly little toy was the attraction for him. So I ate the Happy Meal, and actually kind of liked it – stripped down little burger and pretty good fries. Now, once in a blue moon, when traveling, I’ll do a quick drive through and get a single burger and a small fry – pretty much what the Happy Meal was. Just terrible🥴 Bland hamburger slapped together haphazardly and soggy fries. The last time I did that will be the LAST time.

Restaurant meals, whether sit-down or fast food, have really plummeted in quality and value, most notably beginning with the covid lock down fiasco. I suspect part of that is because every single food establishment posts Help Wanted signs. The owner/manager is probably doing the food prep, waiting tables and washing dishes, while wondering if he’ll do enough business to buy food for the next day’s menu.

I don’t eat out unless traveling for work, but when I do it surprises me to see the restaurants full. I guess people just don’t cook for themselves much anymore. My grocery store probably reserves at least 50% of the space for pre-made and packaged food, of which I buy very little. I know what the raw ingredients cost vs the convenience foods, and while time is money, it’s still less expensive and more healthy to prepare your own food.

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