NONFICTION BY ZACHARY ASHER

A Personal History of the Happy Meal

This is a constructed memory: I am five, or seven, or ten, in the back seat of the Honda Civic. It might be the green Civic my dad had in the earliest days; it could also be the blue Civic he upgraded to later. Depending on the day, we wait at the light to turn right into the McDonald’s parking lot in Fredericksburg, or left across the busy intersection to the one at Potomac Mills. But constant is the McDonald’s logo, and constant is the tires-on-asphalt sound that only happens when you have nearly reached your destination. We pull up, we get out, I hug him, I walk to the Ford Escape where my mom is waiting; she always gets here early. There are no faces.  Constant, instead, is the Happy Meal: the burger I won’t eat, the fries I will, and the apple pie I slowly tire of over many years.

This is a constructed memory in that it doesn’t depict a specific event: It’s a composite of roughly ten years of roughly weekly exchanges. Except for a few, very specific moments, the nameless hours in the McDonald’s parking lot have gathered themselves into a single placeholder image, a sort of talisman to touch ritually in my mind, just as the exchange itself was ritual.

This is also a constructed memory in that its events were constructed for me. If every story of divorce is its own unique drama, McDonald’s is a common theme: The parenting blog iMom recommends McDonald’s as an ideal hand-off spot for young kids, the “fun distraction” helping mitigate the cold logistics. The blog of Ciyou & Dixon, Attorneys at Law, deems McDonald’s “common and good” for the act. The website Mothers of Sons is darker and more direct: McDonald’s is “public.”

It seems clear in retrospect, from the distance of adulthood, that my parents were advised to pick some place like McDonald’s as their “child exchange” location for some combination of these reasons. It’s an obvious choice, but it’s a strange intimacy to share with an internet’s worth of others. I have the image of walking the gold-lit blacktop alone, only to notice a hundred other light-up sneakers tramping across it with me.

And, at the other end of the parking lot, always that Happy Meal. Unique in being irrefutably mine. Unique, also, in being utterly universal.

The Happy Meal was invented by Yolanda Fernández de Cofiño; this is well documented.

In a photo from the time, Yolanda stands in a knee-length dress — white, strewn with small, randomly spaced black squares, like an old computer punch-card. Her face is oval, olive-toned, topped with frizzy black hair that puffs up, cloud-like, from the top of her head. There are creases next to her eyes from her smile.

The smile is enigmatic. From normal viewing distance, it reads like a toothy grin for the camera. The effort of it has pushed up her cheeks, creating deep gullies on either side of her mouth, like parentheses. But the photo is grainy enough to allow a different read. Viewed close up, the teeth disappear, the face reconfigures, and the smile becomes tight-lipped; happy, no doubt, but controlled, aware of the camera in a different way.

This is the celebrated story: Yolanda and her husband founded the first McDonald’s franchise in Guatemala in 1974. Their first two years were “not very successful,” according to the publication Al Día, but Yolanda pressed on—a labor of love.

By 1978, the restaurants were doing well enough, and Yolanda herself was the president of McDonald’s Guatemala. But the cultural transplant had complications: Guatemalan kids were overwhelmed by the menu, and their parents were ordering them adult American portions. In response, Yolanda assembled “Ronald’s Menu,” a more limited selection for kids to choose from, with smaller portions they could actually finish. She topped it off with a sundae and a small toy from the local market.

This story, by the time it comes down to the present day, is succinct and well-rehearsed. Yolanda’s inspiration, according to her, boils down to a single, compelling image: a small boy, sitting at a table, struggling to eat a full-sized Big Mac.

The image, of course is convenient. It’s probably reductive, too. It draws the connection between the problem, and the creative genius’s solution, in too beautifully straight a line. But there’s no doubt it’s essentially true. In the photo, to the right, next to Yolanda’s Mona Lisa smile and her punch-card dress, stands a man dressed as Ronald McDonald. His bright red hair is even cloudier than hers, his smile painted to be even wider, and he’s handing her a silver trophy shaped like a striding man. It’s 1982, and Yolanda is receiving the Ronald Award, recognition of her “outstanding contributions to the company,” including Ronald’s Menu, known as the Happy Meal in the English-speaking world.

By this point the Happy Meal has gone worldwide (after having “migrated from Guatemala,” as the news outlet Axios pointedly puts it one Hispanic Heritage Month). Yolanda has cemented her place in history. It’s unclear how much she’s smiling about it.

My parents’ divorce predates most of my memories. In that I was fortunate, spared the trauma of that initial separation. The fact that my parents live two hours apart, effectively do not speak, and only share the same air weekly, in a McDonald’s parking lot, feels as natural and inevitable as death and taxes.

Part of this natural rhythm is the ride from the hand-off point in Fredericksburg (in summer) or Potomac Mills (during the school year) to Richmond on Sunday nights. My mom and I generally don’t speak a lot during this ride: She has spent the weekend working her way through medical school or freelancing as a copyeditor, and she is understandably exhausted. And besides, there is the unspoken agreement not to talk about the time at the other house too terribly much.

All the same, there is comfort here. The sky is black and the upholstery is brownish-gray and the container of Happy Meal fries is red, and these are the colors of the familiar, contained, and knowable universe.

Even when the car’s fan-belt snaps one evening, this is not a problem. From the driver’s seat my mom gently guides the car to the left-hand shoulder. (We are in the fast lane, and there is not enough time to get to the other, slower side of the highway before the engine gives out.) There is a pager in the pocket of the short, white med-student jacket hanging on the front seat, but this is the time before cell phones were ubiquitous. While she can receive requests for help, she can’t send them.

I can remember the car’s shining, rectangular overhead light with its beveled edges, but I have no idea how long we sit there, waiting for something to happen. One car does slow down to check we’re okay, but for reasons I can’t fathom, the driver moves on without assisting us. Finally a second car pulls over—this one with a car-phone, wonder of wonders—and now there is nothing left to do but wait for the tow truck. I am still at an age where the prospect of a tow truck is exciting.

While we wait, we talk about little-kid things: dinosaurs and TV and Pokémon. (Soon after this, I will be stuck on a puzzle in Pokémon Gold on the Game Boy Advance, and she will spend her weekend learning the game and getting me past it.) When the tow truck driver arrives, I jabber to him about the same, effortlessly looping him into our conversation until I fall asleep.

I can pierce the veil now, and I suspect this evening was not as dreamy from my mom’s perspective. Perhaps she did not feel that she had guided the car all that gently to the shoulder when the tiny sedan, her lifeline, abruptly died at 80MPH. Perhaps she knows why the first car to pull over did not help. Perhaps she did not greet the coming tow truck with excitement. The fact that she held this all within herself was, and is, a priceless gift.

But I was not happy just because I was oblivious. On this Sunday night, one of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of post-handoff excursions past this same stretch of I-95, while the wind from each fast-passing car rocks our Ford like the cradle in the lullaby, I am content in the knowledge that I am exactly where I am supposed to be.

The Happy Meal was invented by Bob Bernstein; this is well documented.

In a photo, years after the fact, Bob leans over a plush leather chair, holding the iconic box in both hands like an offering. He is wearing a corporate gray-blue button-down with the top button open, a crooked half-grin showing through well-kept white stubble. His hair is white too, and it matches the clouds visible in the background through floor-to-ceiling windows. He is clearly high up: The sky and the earth meet just below his shoulder, and if he wasn’t standing there you could see the whole horizon.

This is the celebrated story: in the 1970s, McDonald’s was losing its edge with kids. In response, a McDonald’s regional manager turned to Bob, a successful advertiser out of Kansas City, for creative ideas to claw back the demographic.Bob came back with the founding tenets of the Happy Meal brand: a brightly colored cardboard box covered in illustrations, puzzles, and games. He even came up with the name, going so far as to trademark the phrase “Happy Meal,” which he later sold to McDonald’s for a dollar. (Sometimes credit is its own reward.)

Speaking with the Chicago Tribune, Bob would credit his own inspiration to two sources: first, learning that “‘Moms needed something simple to handle’ and [that] restaurant owners wanted to streamline the often chaotic ordering of kids’ food.”

And second, watching his son. By the time the Tribune spoke with him, this part of Bob’s story was succinct and well rehearsed: “I came up with the Happy Meal, in 1975, as I watched my son at the breakfast table reading his cereal box. He did it every morning. I thought, ‘We make a box for McDonald’s that holds a meal and gives kids things to do.’”

The image—of a young boy “staring at the cereal box…read[ing] the front, the back, and the sides, over and over again,” sparking genius across the table, as a Mental Floss article later dramatized it—is convenient. It’s probably reductive, too.

But there’s no doubt Bob’s story is essentially true. In Bob’s office, probably somewhere over his shoulder as he leans on his leather chair in the photo, there is a bronze trophy in the shape of a Happy Meal. He received it from McDonald’s corporate in 1987, in recognition of his “bringing the Happy Meal, a bold idea,” into the world.

By that point the Happy Meal had gone worldwide. Bob had cemented his place in history, too.

My dad and I create our own sense of motion. We have to; driving on I-95 is like a picture taken by a toddler. Some parts are a blur, and others, at random, are strangely in perfect focus, leaving you to stare at the same scraggly tree or billboard or the back of the driver’s seat headrest for an hour at a time.

So on the way up—Richmond to Washington, DC, on Friday afternoons, in the Civic’s back seat—I do my best to fascinate him. You become aware of aspects of your parents’ personalities a piece at a time, but I know from the beginning that my dad is smart, and that to tell him something interesting, that he doesn’t already know, is an achievement.

Sometimes I regurgitate everything I remember learning that week. Unfortunately, he has a good grasp of elementary-school math, so I don’t break much ground there, but he always mirrors my enthusiasm. I make more progress asking questions: He will tell me something about his research, or how computers work, or how languages come into being, and I will restate the point to make sure I understand it, or ask him how this or that concept connects to another idea he had mentioned.

But as far as I am concerned, every question in every subject has the same right answer: his head cocked sharply to one side as if listening to something, hard. From the back seat I can’t see his face, but I know that if I could, his eyes would be staring upward as if searching the sky. This is the sign I have made a point he hasn’t thought of, or asked a question that he can’t answer on autopilot. As we sit, stuck in traffic in some otherwise empty county, achieving a head-tilt feels like flooring the gas pedal.

On the way down—Washington, DC, to the McDonald’s parking lot, on Sunday evenings—we reverse our roles. When the traffic is especially bad, and it is clear we are going nowhere for a while, my dad will improvise a story. The only rule is that it will last as long as the current jam, meaning that some are short and direct, and others are incredible stemwinders, looping back and around on themselves. They move while we don’t.

Searching my memory now, I can’t recall a single one of these stories. I don’t know if they usually made me happy or sad, or were funny, or even if they managed to hold my attention. The only shred of story I still have is a moment in which the headlights of thousands of cars, stuck in a traffic jam like our own, suddenly break free of their vehicles, and float up and above the congestion like paper lanterns.

I also have a composite memory of reaching the end of any number of traffic jams, feeling the acceleration, and wondering what we had been stuck there for.

Any diner with chicken tenders and a puzzle on a paper placemat has a kids’ option; that isn’t what makes the Happy Meal special. The Happy Meal is a get-rich-quick scheme. Mostly metaphorically. But that doesn’t make it any less real. The Happy Meal dangles a shortcut to something the customer wants quite badly, conveniently pre-packaged and nestled in next to the food. For parents, of course, the promise is a little peace. The image of an exhausted parent forced to the McDonald’s drive-through by a screaming child is cliché, but it’s also the sign of a social contract that’s been written into the greater American deal: buy a Happy Meal, catch a break.

For kids, it might be something more aspirational. Christopher Borelli, the author of the Chicago Tribune piece, notes that “for many children…[the Happy Meal] offered a first bit of autonomy, their own food.” There’s something to that. For millions, the Happy Meal is perhaps the first exposure to the promise of freedom without responsibility; that intoxicating feeling of demanding exactly what you want from options quietly constrained by a list.

And then there are moments when the Happy Meal does literally become a get-rich-quick scheme. For this it has the toys to thank. The first Happy Meal “toys” barely deserve the title, but the “McDoodler” stencils, “McWrist” wallets, Grimace-shaped erasers and the like that came out of the first, circus-themed Happy Meal box in 1979 generated a craze that inspires nostalgia to this day, and foreshadowed something even bigger.

The Big One finally came in 1997. That year, Ty, Inc. made an agreement with McDonald’s to include Teenie Beanies — a limited run of fun-size Beanie Babies—in Happy Meal boxes across the country. The deal catapulted the toy from fad into full-blown phenomenon. One collector, interviewed years later by Vox, jokes that “she and her friends were ‘feeding all the homeless in Houston’ after circling around McDonald’s drive-throughs buying Happy Meals to secure the Teenie Beanies found inside.” Parents and children alike thronged the Golden Arches, calling ahead to check the stores’ Teenie stock so often they jammed the phone lines. By the end, McDonald’s had sold more than 100 million Beanie-stuffed Happy Meals.

The problem was that at the time, nobody was thinking about the end: not kids, and not adults, either. Like Dutch tulips in the 1600s and American stocks in the 1930s, a slice of the population came to genuinely believe that the value of Beanie Babies—including Teenie Beanies—would go up forever, and that by buying now, they could secure a comfortable future for their families at a great price. One high-profile believer was the actor Chris Robinson, who according to the book The Great Beanie Baby Bubble invested $100,000 in the toys to pay his kids’ college tuition; by the time they were college-aged, Robinson’s 20,000 Beanie Babies were worth nothing.

Like many get-rich-quick schemes, the deadly sin the Happy Meal preys on isn’t laziness. (For a brief stretch in the ‘90s, a great many Americans were probably putting more time, attention, and passion into the acquisition of Teenie Beanies than into their jobs.) The sin is a belief in simplicity: that peace, or choice, or financial freedom can be bought for the terms on the menu. It’s forgetting that those terms were set by someone else, and that you always get hungry again.

At Aunt Sarah’s there are walls—plural—loaded floor-to-ceiling with Beanie Babies.

This is more fantastical to me than the Christmas tree–shaped display of gigantic lollipops that stands nearby. I’m not sure what I would do with a lollipop larger than my own head, but I do know I want a Beanie Baby quite badly, and I will spend a long time inspecting the collection, figuring out which one I want the most.

Aunt Sarah’s is a pancake restaurant with a blue roof that stands, raggedly, just on the other side of the guard-rail from I-95. On rare Friday half-days, when my dad picks me up from school in his Honda Civic at noon, we stop at Aunt Sarah’s for lunch. I’m not at an age where I pay attention to his order, but for my part, I’ll usually get their special face-pancake, which has eggs for eyes, sausage patties for ears, and bacon for the mouth. And at the end of the meal is the real draw. I’ll peruse the loaded shelves of the hokey general-store section and select a Beanie Baby, which I’ll ask my dad to add to the check.

There are only a few Friday half-days a year, and I am young enough that a few months can constitute a lot of brain-development, so the visits to Aunt Sarah’s serve as somewhat random punctuation-marks to early childhood. Each trip is the same in form—pull just off the highway, pancake, Beanie Baby—and the style of our conversation is the same over the blue plastic-and-plywood table as in the car. But in the irregular, staccato rhythm of our Aunt Sarah’s stops, played out over months and years, I slowly learn the pattern of what not to bring up at the table.

School is fine, but don’t talk about the other house. On one occasion I will be picked up wearing a t-shirt that reads “My Mom Is A Doctor,” and my dad will ask me to change into something else. I will recall, but not say, that my mom selects my outfits.

Friends are fine, but select the upcoming birthday parties to mention with extreme care. Ultimately, a weekend in Richmond is a weekend not in Washington, DC, which is the most precious resource.

Most important, don’t comment on the acrimony, in either direction. Receive placidly the acid-tipped critiques of my mom’s choice of the schools I attend; of her choice to go to medical school and put down roots in Richmond; of her penchant for buying me unhealthy Happy Meals at hand-off. And breeze past the disorientingly vicious voicemail, in my mom’s voice, that auto-plays during dinner one night, leaving my dad and me frozen, listening, like deer.

Eventually, these examples will pull together into the general rule: don’t ask about the divorce. Over time I will discern that my parents’ relationship is dark and alien to me. But in adherence to the rule, I will never ask how or why it has gotten this way, and they will never tell me.

Back at the blue table, a toddler wanders by, screaming, and shouting “No!” when her mother asks her to come back. “She’s testing her limits,” my dad tells me. “It’s common at that age.”

I don’t know which Beanie Baby I selected on that particular visit. But it joins me in the car, on the way to a bedroom overflowing with others like it.

The Happy Meal earns an estimated $10 million a day for McDonald’s. In the years since its formal launch in 1979, the relationship between the parent company and its world-famous offspring has gotten, well, awkward.

For one, a paternity suit has raged almost since the moment of conception. Bob Bernstein is a stalwart defender of his title as the Happy Meal’s creator; he was horrified to find that when the McDonald’s employee who commissioned him to invent it, Dick Brams, died in 1988 at the age of 45, Brams began to be eulogized, in company lore and the public imagination, as the “Father of the Happy Meal.” Perhaps this motivated Bob to make his creation-myth, about watching his son at the breakfast table, so tight and succinct. As a good ad-man, he knows the importance of a punchy narrative.

Yolanda, meanwhile, barely gets a mention. A review of the literature (read: puff pieces about the history of the Happy Meal) reveals that Yolanda, and her story of a child struggling over a Big Mac, were essentially invisible to the English-language press until recent years, when the Happy Meal’s 40th anniversary in 2019 brought renewed attention. When pressed, Bob acknowledges Yolanda’s importance, but stops well short of sharing the credit.

McDonald’s usually nimble corporate PR seems uncharacteristically tripped up by this tension. On the one hand, a Spanish-only hagiography of Yolanda (who died in 2021), published on the McDonald’s Guatemala website, proudly declares that “the Happy Meal was invented in Guatemala” by Yolanda in 1978. On the other hand, despite having dedicated web-pages on the celebrated history of the company itself and even on the invention of Big Mac sauce, McDonald’s seems unwilling to discuss the origins of the Happy Meal anywhere on its corporate website. Despite the tantalizing promise of an article titled “40 Years of Happy Meals” that comes up when searching the term, clicking the link simply takes you to the product page and nutritional information. (Borelli, the intrepid Tribune journalist, attempted this same search in 2019 and got the same results.)

The effect is to reduce the credit for a multi-billion dollar piece of intellectual property to a referee-less game of he-said-she-said. And in the sheer, awkward childishness of this, with the haze of corporate myth-making cleared away, the stakes of the game come into focus. After all, the Happy Meal is many things, but it’s never just a Happy Meal. In its inventor(s) mind(s), it is a genuine contribution to society: a source of joy and happy memories, of autonomy and childhood. It is something that comes from them and that is good. Credit for it cannot simply be given up—or shared, which is the same thing.

In the cold light of day, there’s no way either Yolanda or Bob discovered the idea for the Happy Meal in a single flash of inspiration. That’s not how creation works. It’s a simplification that draws a line of ownership as straight as birth, and like birth, the messy bits often get skipped in the retelling.The numberless times the idea, perhaps, began to take shape in either of their minds, but was overtaken by the more pressing demands of the day. The disparate moments of empathy, opportunity, and reflection—the moments that make an idea organic and human—mushed together into an amalgamation of cereal boxes and Big Macs and boys for convenience and simplicity. The result is a paternity, like the Happy Meal itself, that is artificial enough to be owned.

Not that any of that diminishes the creation. For all the children of divorce who walked the McDonald’s blacktop for so much of their lives, it might be a source of familiarity, and even comfort, to know that like them, the story of their Happy Meal is of a man and a woman, neither talking to the other, both claiming custody of an imaginary child sitting silently at a table.

The Potomac Mills sign, best viewed driving southbound on I-95 in moderate traffic, has gone through several iterations over the years. Today it’s glittering and silver-white, and speaks of upscale chains and new development. But the sedimentary weight of years of memories buries that image in my mind’s eye, and replaces it with the 1990s design that is, to me, the original one: a white circle, glowing a dull halogen like the light of a school hallway, and in the middle, a cartoon tree laden with red fruit.

When we passed that tree, it was just a few more minutes to our exit, which was flanked by a sign that said “Welcome to Dale City” and looked for all the world, in color, font, and shape, like a giant box of Dove soap. My dad and I waited at the light to turn left across the busy intersection to the McDonald’s parking lot, bathed in the tires-on-asphalt sound that only happens when you have nearly reached your destination. We pulled up, we got out, I hugged him, I walked to the Ford Escape where my mom was waiting; she always got there early.

I have no memory of my last hand-off or last Happy Meal. Instead, there is the rock-solid, crystal-clear image of the fries, and the box, and the burger, sitting to my left in the back seat hundreds and hundreds of times, as my mom and my dad and I grow and change around them. Even if I could recover the memory of that final, anticlimactic trip, the composite image would probably still feel more real.

One evening many years later, my mom and I were walking on a brick path that encircled my college’s main green. I was graduating in about twelve hours, and the trees and buildings were tall and quiet. Gripped with a sudden now-or-never feeling, I broke the cardinal rule of our relationship and asked what had happened between her and my dad; what had caused them to divorce, and to do so in the way that they did.

She paused, thought about it for a moment, and finally said that she didn’t really know. No one memory came to mind to explain it, and as far as she was concerned, she and my dad were on fine terms. They had, after all, gotten me to this point, together.

I decided not to press the issue, and we continued our circuit around the green.

In fall of 2022, McDonald’s partnered with the fashion brand Cactus Plant Flea Market to put out what was styled the “Adult Happy Meal.” Consciously designed to evoke nostalgia for the original, the limited edition product comes in a colorful cardboard box, containing fries, McNuggets or a burger, and even a toy—small plastic action figures of classic McDonald’s characters, or of Cactus Buddy, the fashion company’s mascot.

All the toys have doubled sets of eyes. Within a few weeks of release, they were selling online for thousands of dollars apiece, heirs to the Teenie Beanies of old. Maybe I should invest this time around, but I don’t think I’ll have the chance. Those boxes are sold out everywhere; I couldn’t get one if I tried.

Zachary Asher is a writer living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His work has appeared, under various bylines, in ThinkProgress, Campaigns & Elections Magazine, The Washington Post, and  The Smart Set.