On The Men Eating Hamburgers in Their Cars

There’s a vulnerability to admitting what “the algorithm,” as we all call it, serves up to us. The algorithm is uncannily good at learning what we really want to see, beneath our thin façades of politeness and civilization. So it is with some reservations that I admit that, when I go to YouTube, I am often greeted with a series of tempting thumbnails, upon which I often click: men eating hamburgers in their cars.

The author, at a solitary luncheon, watching videos of men eating hamburgers in their cars

Well, it’s not always hamburgers. Sometimes, it’s chicken strips or nuggets, donuts, or dumplings. The standard video goes like this: a man, who has at least one distinctly irritating personal quality, has purchased a large bag of fast food and is eating it in his car. Usually he crams as much food as possible into his mouth. Between gigantic mouthfuls, he evaluates the food. Just how crispy are the new Chicken Dippers from Popeye’s? How is the Wednesday Addams “Meal of Misfortune” from Wendy’s? These men will tell me, and I will listen.

I have so many questions. For example, who the fuck is watching all of these? The answer is: me. It’s me. I am watching them. I wonder if all the other viewers are thinking the same thing.

Every one of these videos that I have seen has hundreds of thousands of views. Eating hamburgers in your car in front of a camera seems to be a pretty reliable way of making a living online, unlike, say, writing about literature. (To take a random example.) This makes me wonder, though: are there really unsuccessful fast food reviewers, who are out there, uploading video after video of themselves grimacing while they pound down the new Checkers Triple Stacker in the front seat of their Nissan Versa to absolutely no applause or views? There must be—there are successes and failures in every arena of endeavor. What separates the “good” and successful hamburger car man from the “bad” and unsuccessful? Or is it completely luck of the draw, just based on who the algorithm happens to reward?

Sometimes, there are two two hamburger car men (HCMs) hunched in a single vehicle. HCM A watches, silently, as HCM B bites into the burger, nods while chewing, and pronounces a verdict. Then, the HCM B watches, silently, as HCM A puts into his mouth as many fries as will physically fit. Sometimes, they spill au jus or ketchup or pie filling on the car seats or the legs of their pants.

Why am I watching this? I have absolutely no reason to be interested in this. Like, why review this food? None of it will be good, and none of it will be so bad as to be interesting. Reviews are supposed to be about evaluating the quality of something, right? How could questions of quality be relevant to Wendy’s chicken nuggets? Don’t we all know that they’re going to be merely OK, very salty and too sweet, and vaguely sickening?

I have a few theses. Perhaps, in a fractured world where everyone’s algorithm serves up different content, we are all still served up the same crummy coffee and donuts and hamburgers at national fast food chains. Fast food, like football, is one of the very few forms of genuinely mass culture that we have left. So these videos are, in a sense, reassuring. Watching these videos, viewers recognize a common experience that is neither horrific nor overtly spiritually deadening. It is an expression of one of the remaining pieces of not-completely-bleak mass culture.

There’s also something more ancient and universal at play here: the desire to eat with others. I find myself eating lunch at my desk, intending to work through my lunch, and clicking on these videos and eating, together with these men, both in our perfect solitude, me in my office and he in his car.

Mostly I watch from a self-destructive impulse. I am wasting my one life watching these videos in the full understanding that they are a waste of time. Some twisted part of me, deep in my brain stem, believes that they are somehow more worth attending to than any of the many things I might work on that could bring lasting enjoyment or improve my life in a number of ways. (This is why you are reading a post about these videos rather than one about, say, a good book.) I wonder if the HCMs feel any guilt for what they do. This video, for example, has 33 million views. It is about a minute long. This means that it has resulted in 550,000 wasted hours—approximately, in total, 62.78 years. I am not, of course, saying that this video has done the equivalent, in any way, of killing a 62-year-old man. That would be ridiculous. I am simply observing a fact. After all, nobody’s forcing me to watch these videos. I am choosing to do it to myself. There’s something sinister about consciously wasting one’s own time in a way that isn’t even fun. I don’t particularly care for this part of myself.

(And I swear I’ll write about a book next week.)