Good Mood Food

When my mother first moved to Rochester, Minn. a young newly-wed from the bright lights of cosmopolitan Ohio, she wasn't super thrilled. Then she took a drive, ran some errands or something, and got lost among the many "turns right at the cornfields." And the only landmark in sight? A giant ear of corn. Like hundreds of feet high giant. Creepy giant. Corporate corn giant.

Anyway, that's when she pretty much decided to give up on Rochester (not really). And I had a similar moment when I moved to my apartment in Minneapolis. This is what warms the chill night air every morning as I make my lonely walk to bus stop.

It's horrible, right? A giant "Howdy y'all" hat with flashing lights advertising roast beef all through the night. And mostly I hate it, but I also kind of love it. For better or worse, this one restaurant defines my immediate environment more than anything else.

Founded in 1964, Arby's and I had no particular beef for most of my life. But then they started those "Good Mood Food" commercials which are so sinisterly honest about the addictive quality of chemical-filled, chemical-manipulating fast foods that it gives me the creeps. "Good mood food," those stupid, smiling average young Americans sing in the commercial, openly mocking you for being just a rat in a lab reacting to the drug of salt and fat.


Worse still, this particular restaurant fills the morning air with the starchy scent of french fries before 8 am even rolls around.

Cheery cowboy hat flashing. Delicious scents wafting. A rain-soaked intersection and the eerie silence of morning. No one else is even out. For a minute, I consider that this is the morning, at last, that the world ended and I finally know for sure that I'll be missing the rapture boat. Then I see a hooded college kid shuffle along slowly. Zombies. This is the morning everyone else turns into zombies and zombie headquarters must be this Arby's. They're coming for me. But then anonymous college kid turns down the street and doesn't make a lunge for my brains.


I look up at the menacing cowboy hat, a symbol of hospitality rendered obscene in its garish, glowing grimace, and nod to it. Very well, Arby's hat, you aren't actually a sign of end times. In fact, you make it easy for me to give directions to out-of-towners. And, you provide way more light for me on those sketchy early morning streets than any lame streetlights.


We'll call it a truce.