A pair of teenagers suing McDonald’s for their staggering obesity is both alarming and laughable; equally shocking and heart-breakingly funny is Super Size Me, Morgan Spurlock’s documentary about his self-imposed and meticulously monitored month-long McDonald’s binge.  

Super Size Me certainly explores the question of where corporate responsibility bleeds into personal accountability, but the film focuses on the more gruesome results of a McDonald’s-only diet and on a culture of a fast food nation. For 30 increasingly pudgy days, Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald’s, three times a day, and mimicked the average exercise pattern of an American by walking no more than a few thousand steps a day.

Spurlock traveled around the country — we see him shoveling down McDonald’s in cities in California, Texas, West Virginia, Illinois, and Massachusetts, in addition to his home base of New York City — and we see him exploring the lunch rooms of public schools where children happily eat lunches of French fries and cookies while the teachers’ eyes — usually so beady and watchful — callously and irresponsibly turn blind during lunch hour.  

One of the more alarming scenes of the documentary features some first graders at a school in Massachusetts identifying the people and characters in the pictures that Spurlock presents to them. The children generally manage to identify George Washington, though they seem to have little idea of why they manage to recognize him; one child identifies a very typical depiction of Jesus — pale skin, shoulder length hair, a compassionate gaze and a sacred glow warming his visage — as George W. Bush; all children successfully identify Ronald McDonald. One child claims that Ronald McDonald helps operate the cashier, while another child states that Ronald brings all of his friends to McDonald’s (presumably to have a roaringly good and wholesome time in the enclosed McDonald’s playground), but all children demonstrate a remarkable level of brand recognition.  

Aspects of Super Size Me resonate with Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, a piece of investigative journalism with judiciously used research by Eric Schlosser. Spurlock’s condemnation of McDonald’s is evident, well-argued, and humorously articulated. But the underlying argument is far more compelling; far from scape-goating McDonald’s and the McDonaldization of America as the pure source of American obesity, we as individuals are ultimately the most important and powerful custodians of our health.  

Mimi Hanaoka