On Eating a Fast Food Burger and Fries While Operating a Motor Vehicle
By Chris King
November 4, 2026
On this past election day, I had an experience, once familiar, that I had not enjoyed for a very long time: I ate a fast food burger and fries while operating a motor vehicle.
I picked up my partner during her lunch break from work to drive her to the polls. She needed a ride because one of her car tires is flat, and our household finances are such that we do not always fix everything as soon as it breaks.
She voted quickly, and the polls were near the school where she teaches, so we had time to eat. We both like to cook and have local favorites (such as Cugino’s and Mr. Rivera’s Taqueria) when we do eat out. However, we watch true crime on streaming media, and of all the unavoidable advertising, fast food is the only category where the advertiser is not wasting their money on us. This works up an unanswered appetite for fast food burgers and fries.
We recognized that the drive down West Florissant Avenue from the Dellwood Recreation Center, where she voted, to the early childhood education center, where she works, would take us past a who’s who of fast food burger joints. We had most recently been appetized by a Burger King commercial for a Game Day Pretzel Burger, which had my name on it, and she had a nostalgic yearning for a Whopper. So, Burger King got our consumer dollars.
Burger King got more than 30 of our consumer dollars. If you have not purchased a fast food burger and fries in a few years, as I had not, then you are in for an expensive surprise when you do. I had a hard time believing that I was spending more than $30 for two burgers, two medium fries, two medium drinks, and the obligatory gametime addition of a side, the jalapeño cheese nuggets.
But I am not penning this memoir to complain about runaway prices. I am writing to share with you my intense muscle memories of the experience of eating a fast food burger and fries while operating a motor vehicle.
The essential limiting factor, here, is the intense desire not to adorn your clothing with greasy bits of burger, fry, cheese, pickle or brightly colored condiments. This relates to the contexts in which I have most often eaten a fast food burger and fries. In high school, we cruised around town looking for romantic partners, which pursuit would be grotesquely hindered by a greasy smear or a catsup stain on one’s T-shirt. On the road with a traveling rock band, one had only so many, if any, clean garments, and it would be devastating to soil one’s only, or most, clean T-shirt with a blob of mustard.
Let us start, as one does, with the French fries. You know the fries will taste delicious without catsup but so much more tasty with it. So, the condiment must be extracted from its small, slick packets and distributed, as evenly as possible, over the fries packed in their vertical carton. I had ordered medium fries, not small, not only for the volume of fries but also for the container, given that a vertical carton is more promising for distribution of catsup than a horizontal paper sleeve.
Before extracting catsup from a packet, a trash receptacle must be readied. This is done by completely emptying the bag of your food. The driver must then secure perches for his burger and fries, because capsizing the foodstuffs would be a catastrophe to be averted at any cost short of wrecking the car.
Extracting catsup from its packet is a two-handed enterprise, for both the tear and the squeeze, so the driver must deploy a knee to steer the vehicle. That balancing act must be followed with the deft manipulation of catsup-laden fries from carton to maw. A drop of catsup from fry—or, worse, the plummet of an entire catsup-dripping potato fragment from condiment-slicked fingers—would tarnish garments.
More than one packet of catsup will be needed to coat all the fries in a medium carton, but the catsup must be applied and consumed one packet at a time, given the vertical stacking of the fries. This, and the physics of heat loss, encourages getting started on the burger before deploying the second packet of catsup.
Eating a fast food burger while operating a motor vehicle requires another gradual activity: gradually freeing the burger from its paper wrapper. The burger must be freed from its wrapper just enough to be bitten, while the rest of it remains under wrap enough to constrain the condiments and garnishes clinging to the rest of the burger.
The technique required to liberate just enough burger to take a bite without spilling anything from between the buns not being bitten into, while not being so grudging with peeling back the wrapper that you chew off some paper wrapper with the burger, came right back to me from across the many years. That is why I experienced this act as muscle memories. My hands may as well have been taking orders from another being as they peeled back the wrapper incrementally and I nibbled away the burger thereby incrementally exposed.
In this life, however hard one strives, one starts so many things one never finishes. One finishes so many things with so little satisfaction. So very many things dribble off or dissolve, and their conclusion remains in doubt or sadly forgotten because everyone, even the actor who started and finished the action, has stopped paying serious attention.
But there is such a simple and complete joy in dropping into the sack that had been emptied of burgers and fries first the emptied packets of catsup, then the emptied carton that had held the fries, and finally the wrapper emptied of its burger and crumpled into a wad by a greasy fist. First the bag is emptied of its containers full of food, then the containers are emptied of their food, and then the emptied containers are returned, one by one, into the emptied bag. Crimping down the lips of the bag to secure the trash, as those lips had just been crimped down to seal in the heat of the food, completes the symmetry.
Though it had been a long time since I had eaten a fast food burger and fries while operating a motor vehicle, I will not forget the experience anytime soon. It is not so much the lingering memory of a delicious meal. It is not the distant memories of driving around my hometown yearning for teen love. It is not the blurry memories of highway hangovers as a van full of exhausted rock musicians emptied their respective bags of burgers and fries. More than anything, it is the holdover aroma. I had forgotten that nothing is slower to dissipate than the smell of a fast food burger and fries inside a motor vehicle where they had been so carefully, so lovingly, so strategically consumed.
