I don't associate Indiana Jones with fast food. He strikes me as more of a hunter-gatherer type than a drive-through guy. But that hasn't stopped the filmmakers who created him from tying their franchise to burgers and candy bars, and physician Rahul Parikh, writing for Salon, calls them on it:

I'm a pediatrician, and every day I see overweight kids coming into my office. Getting families and kids to change how they eat is an uphill battle, and it doesn't get easier when big studios like yours wheel and deal with companies that peddle junk food and fast food.

You tied Star Wars to Pepsi and Frito-Lay, plastering Yoda and Obi-Wan over 2-liter bottles and Doritos bags. Recently I was watching CNBC and saw the chief marketing officer of Burger King unveil the Indy Whopper, a mammoth, juicy burger with pepper jack cheese and jalapeño sauce (to give it "adventure," the CMO pointed out), a tie-in to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I see you also got Mars to manufacture a Snicker's Adventure Bar with coconut and chai that has Dr. Jones' face on the wrapper.

Besides the fact that none of these foods is healthy, one has to ask if they're what your characters would eat. Would Lord Vader chug down a Pepsi before he wielded his light saber? (If he did, would he drink it with a straw or take off his entire mask?) Wouldn't Indy, now a senior citizen, have more than just a little bump in his cholesterol if he had scarfed down his namesake burger with fries and a soda? How could he be fit enough to chase down ancient relics while dodging boulders and outwitting Nazis?

I agree wholeheartedly with Dr. Parikh, and I recommend reading the entire essay. But it also brings to mind a growing problem with fast food that may end up being a  good thing for the rest of us: the utter incompetence of fast-food restaurants to deliver food fast.

I should preface this by saying that I've worked more minimum-wage jobs than I can recall. A lot of them were in food service -- everything from a greasy smorgasbord in Barnhart, Missouri, to the five-star Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles.

In college I worked at McDonald's, where I came to understand how hard and thankless a job it is to flip hundreds of burgers in a single shift. I don't know how it works now, but back then the guy working the burger grill had four or five different timers whose beeps governed his actions. You miss one beep from one timer, and you mess the whole thing up.

On top of that, you had a manager who directed the volume of the burgers you flipped. In the middle of the lunch or dinner rush, you went to what was called "turn/lay," which means you threw down a new set of frozen burger patties as soon as you flipped the last set. That may have been the most profound stress-hormone-generating system I've ever encountered, because now you had those four or five timers overlapping each other. If you stopped to think about any part of the process, you were screwed.

I mention all this because I think I understand as well as anyone my age just how hard it is to do fast food right. And, increasingly, fast-food restaurants demonstrate that they simply can't get it right anymore.

My kids love Wendy's, and I confess that in a pinch I'll settle for one of their burgers. But Wendy's never ever gets our family's order right. I shit you not: It's been years since we've gotten what we ordered from a Wendy's drive-through. And it's not just Wendy's. Our local Boston Market has gone from "erratic" to "consistently bad" when it comes to filling our orders. We never ate a lot of fast food, but now we go weeks at a time without having any.

If my experiences reflect a real trend, then the Phantom Menace of fast food may kill itself off with incompetence before it kills the rest of us off with crappy food.

Wednesday blog meat:

* The major health threat du jour: Fruit smoothies rot your teeth! The fix is pretty simple -- just brush your teeth. 

* I love this headline: "Teen sex study doubts 'technical virginity'." (If I wanted to triple the number of unique visitors to MPF today, I'd explain what the headline means.)