THE CLAIRVOYANT TIMES — Sitting at his walnut and mahogany desk overlooking palm trees and an azure lagoon, Ray Crock III thumbs open a small canister and instantly inhales deep. He sucks in three or four more breaths before pausing, eyes closed, and allowing a wide smile to spread across his well-tanned face.
“Try it,” he insists, tossing me a can of his newest concoction, McAir, set to be rolled out in McDonald’s stores worldwide in the summer of 2055. I can’t help but think of the Spaceballs movie, when one of Mel Brooks’s characters, President Scroob, enjoys a few salient whiffs of Perri-air. Crock senses my hesitancy.
“It’s nothing but air, pure air, with a couple of scent chemicals,” he says. It’s this last part that worries me. Scent chemicals? That’s what I’m interested in learning more about. Always the intuitive businessman, Crock knows my question before I ask it.
“They’re derived from the food we make,” he says proudly, as if it were an inevitable evolution. “Not everybody wants all the fat and calories in a Big Mac or large fry, so we bottled the scent of our best-selling products, so fat people don’t have to feel guilty about eating crap anymore.”
His notorious no-nonsense logic — offensive, hypocritical and hypothetically self-defeating — distills my fear into petrification. “Yeah, but, what exactly are the chemicals and are they safe?” I ask. Crock laughs, as if my question were rhetorical.
“Safe? We’re selling it, ain’t we,” he says, with no hints of irony. “I can’t talk about specifics, mind you. It’s proprietary.”
Of course it is. “Well, can you tell me about the process of putting the scents into the bottle? How does that work?” I figured if I could massage his ego a bit, he might slip up and tell me something I wanted to know.
“Well, take the Big Mac for example,” Crock begins. “What we do is we take about a thousand Big Macs and we stack ‘em on top of each other, like a tower. They sit in this cylinder that is perforated with tiny holes, so air can be sucked out but solids stay inside. We then suck the air out, add our chemical concoction to make the smell stronger and last longer, and voila! You have McAir.”
What happens to the 1,000 Big Macs after they’re used for their scent? “We recycle them into cow feed. We’ve been a green-certified facility since green was green,” Crock says, exploding in laughter. “Recycling is a priority of ours.”
Cows eating beef? Is that normal? To Crock, that’s what makes McDonald’s burgers taste so unique. “It’s double beef flavor. We feed burgers to all our cows.”
Fearing he would take that statement off the record, I quickly changed the subject. “So all McAir scents are derived in this way?”
Crock affirms, then tosses me another can. On the front is an attractive, racially mixed couple with stylish hair and bright white smiles that beam off the red can. It reads: McAir, hot fudge sundae with nuts. Crock smiles at me, nudges me with hand gestures to quit stalling and take a whiff. I reluctantly oblige.
It hits me like a burning crack rock upon the lips of an impressionable ghettoian. My mind actually wanders to a different place in time. My feet lighten, my heart beats faster but feels somehow slower. The unmistakable sensation of chocolate and vanilla fuse in the back of my throat through my nose. My tongue trembles, and the natural signs of hunger kick in with a vengeance. I want more.
“Try this one,” Crock says, and tosses me a McAir version of the apple pie. It’s euphoric. Never in my wildest dreams could I imagine a sensation to bridge sensations in such a magical and improbable way.
I stayed with Crock for three days, and inhaled roughly $114,000 worth of McAir cans at $5 a piece. Crock comped them all, of course. The first rule of journalism is free food, or in this case, free whiffs of scented air. Considering a Big Mac still only cost 27 cents to make and sells for $2, and from 1,000 Big Macs Crock generates about 20,000 cans of McAir, the profit margin is astounding.
I quickly retired as a journalist and became PR manager for McDonald’s Nike Inc. Ten days later, the United States Department of Agriculture approved an organic version of McAir, called McConscious Whiffer.
Rumors that Burger King is working on a prostate-massaging enema that reverses the digestive track, giving people the sensation that they are eating a Whopper roughly 20 hours after insertion remain unverified. However, Taco Bell’s Scratch-n-Sniff Chalupa division has filed a lawsuit against McDonald’s for stealing its Olfacto-food® technology for McAir. Crock vehemently denied any correlation between McAir and Olfacto-food®, and is countersuing Taco Bell for buying all the USDA Grade F meat on the market, leaving no putrid scraps for McDonald’s burgers.
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