Pushing.

My parents didn't take us to fast food places when I was little.

They thought they were an abomination.

In any case, we didn't have a McDonald's back then in our little town, so it wasn't

like I was confronted by the fact of French fries.

They were some dimly understood concept.

Something that people out there somewhere did to a potato that somehow implicated the

French.

Then one day, after track practice, 13 years old, I went to my first McDonald's.

Have you ever seen a puppy encounter snow for the first time?

He burrows his nose into it with this look of perplexity and sheer delight because he

can't understand where this white thing came from that is both fluffy and cold?

It was like that for me.

A slice of potato.

Crispy on the outside yet somehow pillowy soft on the inside.

Right then and there, I gave my heart to McDonald's.

And then McDonald's broke it.

My name is Malcolm Gladwell.

You're listening to revisionist history might podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.

This week, I'm on a mission to understand why McDonald's betrayed me so many years ago.

Our story begins in a non-descript office park in Foster City, California, just south of

San Francisco, a place called Matson, maybe the top food research and development house

...