Supersizing the London Olympics

It is a magnificent monument to American corporate hegemony, a massive eatery capable of seating 1,500 patrons at once and serving up to 14,000 diners a day –– a day.

I’m referring, of course, to the two-story McDonald’s that was specially constructed for the London Olympic Games. It’s the world’s largest restaurant, which will be taken apart after the Games. As the Olympics’ main food sponsor since 1976, McDonald’s has been granted greatest access to peddle its products at the Olympics, including a front-and-center mega-restaurant in London capable of pumping out Big Macs and fries with assembly-line efficiency.

This one McDonald’s will be capable of serving up to 18.8 million calories’ worth of “food” per day throughout the 16 days of the Olympics, which will run from July 27 to Aug. 12.

Over the past week, we in the U.S. –– yours truly included –– have complained that American Olympic outfits were produced by Ralph Lauren not in the U.S., but in China. In Great Britain, though, they couldn’t care less about our wardrobe malfunctions. As far as Britons are concerned, the Americans have invaded their capital with tons of fat, salt and sugar at what should be a two-week tribute to athletic prowess and an object lesson in health and fitness.

The London Assembly, similar to New York’s City Council, and the Academy of Royal Medical Colleges are protesting the McDonald’s presence at the Games, along with two of the Olympics’ other primary sponsors, Coca-Cola and Heineken, saying that accepting corporate dollars from companies that market obesity-inducing fare around the world is unconscionable when the number of overweight people is growing by the day.

The esteemed members of the Academy of Royal Medical Colleges say they’re worried about Great Britain’s 22 percent obesity rate. They fear it might climb to 33 percent by 2020.

No worries in the U.S. We’ve already reached the one-third mark, and as a nation, we’re only getting heavier. According to Fox News, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine recently estimated the weight of the total human population. The results are scary.