Bear Refuses to Eat McDonalds. Cats Refuse KFC.

Fast food isn't good, and it's no longer fast and cheap. It's also not food.

The year was 1987 (or thereabouts), and I and my fellow 19-year-old housemates were living paycheck to paycheck. And some weeks, there was a little gap between those paychecks during which we were just plain broke.

One of those gaps happened to coincide with a major sale on Kentucky Fried Chicken’s “Chicken Little” sandwiches. When these were first introduced, they were very small breaded chicken patties on a squarish bun. I have not thought about this in years, but if I am recalling correctly, the sale was ten of these tiny sandwiches for a buck—one of those crazy limited-time deals designed to catch people’s attention.

It sure caught ours.

We were out of food. Our two cats were out of food. My parents had recently given me one of their jars of pennies, and it was time to cash in. We counted them out: eleven dollars and change. We filled plastic baggies with 100 pennies each, went to KFC, and bought a surfeit of Chicken Littles.

They weren’t very good, but they were food.

Or so we thought.

We went to feed some to our cats. They were as hungry as we were, but they refused to eat them. We peeled off the breading and they still refused to eat them.

They smelled them briefly, the way cats do if you stick anything in their faces—they might as well have been a piece of cardboard or some other inanimate object. They simply didn’t recognize them as food.

I was reminded of all this when, a couple of days ago, I saw the video below.

You can respond to my account above by saying that cats are picky eaters. And for the most part, that is true. But how about bears…?

A few years later, I lived in Massachusetts, and a friend told me that a black bear had been showing up and rifling through the dumpster every night at a nearby state forest (Daughters of the American Revolution State Forest, if I am remembering aright). There was a safe viewing point in a barn loft that overlooked the dumpster, so a few of us set ourselves up in there and waited.

Sometime after dark, our patience was rewarded. A big ol’ black bear showed up and started tossing the dumpster.

He ate some old bread.

He savaged a plastic jug to get out every drop of milk—which I can only assume was pretty sour after spending at least one summer day in the trash.

Eventually he ran across some big sausages and gobbled those down in seconds. How rotten had those become by that point? Had they even been cooked? He didn’t care.

In fact, he wasn’t very discriminating at all.

Now, tack on a few more years…

I am living in Montana and building a cabin in the middle of nowhere in the Garnet Range. Montana is rugged in general, and this was seriously out there. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my. Well, no tigers, but plenty of (mountain) lions and bears.

Every so often, we drove back to Missoula or down to Drummond for building supplies or food. Before one of those trips, we heaved a bag of garbage atop the shed in the naive assumption that a seven-foot climb up plywood walls would dissuade bears.

It didn’t. We came back to find the bag completely pillaged. The bear also managed to find, up against the side of the shed, a bottle of oil and a bottle of vinegar. He did not drink the vinegar, but he had obviously knocked around the bottle of oil to get out every drop.

Or maybe he-bear was a she-bear. Either way, vinegar was the only thing (s)he didn’t gobble up.

Now, with all that in mind, watch this magnificent video:

Did you notice when the bear almost literally says, Talk to the paw, because the bear ain’t listening? Tom the Bear simply does not recognize McDonalds as food. Even when the man separates out the sandwich into more recognizable components, Tom is having none of it.

(As an aside, I love the fact that whenever you see a video of someone who is friends with a bear, it’s always a Russian. I was in Russia in 1991, and I still have three good friends from that time. Do they all secretly have bear friends? I will have to ask them.)

What little Russian I ever spoke is pretty much gone now, but I did recognize one bit that went untranslated. Right before the caption translates the woman’s voice saying that the bear doesn’t want it, the man says “не правильно.” I think the best translation into American English might be something like, “This shit ain’t right.”

No, it really isn’t.

Fast food just isn’t food.

The only time my wife and I eat it is when we are on a road trip. Every second counts when you are trying to put at least 12 hours of highway under your wheels in a day, so we tend to go for the fastest option.

But on our last drive to Florida, we discovered that fast food isn’t fast anymore. The waits were really long. A Wendy’s on the northern edge of Virginia was shockingly slow. We waited in a Taco Bell for ten minutes just to be told that it would be another twenty minutes before we could expect our food. We left, obviously.

We also discovered that fast food in no longer inexpensive. The prices have risen to a point almost comparable to those of a diner. But in a diner, for just a few dollars extra, you can sit down in a calm environment and have your food brought to you by a nice waitress named Charlene.

It is said that in business, there are three desirable qualities of a product or service: fast, inexpensive, and good—but that you can only ever get two of them: If it’s good and you get it fast, it’s gonna cost you. If it’s good and cheap, there will be high demand and thus it probably won’t be quick.

Fast food was never supposed to be particularly good. Its niche was that it was fast and cheap. Apparently, it is now none of those things. And if is is neither fast nor good nor cheap—and possibly not even food at all—then does it even exist?

From now on, we’re either going to go to sit-down restaurants on our road trips (and just deal with the extra time used), or we will pack sandwiches.

Whatever it is, it needs to be something that a bear would recognize as food.

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