McMillan asks why the distribution of good, healthy food — easy access to which she considers a human right — is so often left to private companies, begging us to change the conversation from one about what people eat (she thinks that given the choice, people will eat relatively healthily) to one about healthy food’s accessibility.

Over the phone, McMillan explained her project’s goals, and shared insights from her experiences as an embedded food journalist.

One of the arguments you make throughout the book is that food is a “social good” and a human right. You sometimes even cite the Founding Fathers and their desires in the course of your argument. What’s the basis for that? Do you think everyone would agree that healthy food is a right the Founding Fathers thought all Americans deserved?

That’s more of a rhetorical flourish, I think, than anything that’s enshrined in the Constitution or any founding documents. But it refers to a very different time in America’s history. The Founding Fathers weren’t living at a time when you could possibly have thought that food would be this weird stuff that came in boxes and you pulled off shelves, the way you do now. That model didn’t exist — supermarkets didn’t exist until 1930. So I think the idea that getting fresh, fairly healthy food would be difficult or unusual anywhere would not have occurred to them.

Obviously, diet has always correlated somewhat with social class. I have a quote in the book somewhere, from Jefferson, about how there’s less fresh food in the diet of the poor than that of the rich. He says that this is bad (but he says it in a much more beautiful and thoughtful way than that). I think when you have Founding Fathers talking about [that state of affairs] being unconscionable, and not being what they’re going for when they’re building the founding premises for the nation, and when you look at how our food system has changed over time, it’s reasonable to say that none of them would be particularly happy with the fact that, in a country that’s as rich as the U.S., fresh and healthy food is seen as a luxury, as opposed to something that everybody has a right to and has access to.

To the extent that any of us accept government, we accept that government has a responsibility to ensure really basic parts of human existence to its citizens. Water, roads, electricity — we spend time and energy and money on the part of public entities to make sure that everybody has access to these things. And yet we’ve left food entirely to the private market. We have lots of food in lots of places, but there’s very little fresh and healthy food in some places, and that’s mostly because supermarkets have one set of incentives to succeed, and they don’t always line up with making sure we all have really healthy food. When we expand cities, we put in water lines and electricity lines — and the government will make sure that that happens and it’s not too expensive — but when it comes to food, we say, “Oh, whatever, we’ll just see what shows up.” And often what shows up is not great.

You make another, similar point in the book: that we make sure kids know how to read, but we don’t make sure they know how to cook.

Well, obviously, I think literacy is really, really important in terms of books …

But it doesn’t help you survive on the most basic level.

Right. Traditionally, we’ve thought the point of a school is to create a workforce. So we teach people all these workforce skills. That model evolved at a time when it was pretty common, at least for middle-class families, for women to stay home. Women would spend time and energy in the kitchen, cooking — and could then teach kids how to cook. Now, that’s not the norm. There are all these competing social and work pressures that make it really hard for folks to cook at home and to spend a lot of time on it; also, as there’s more and more academic pressure on kids to do all this stuff after school, there’s just less time for that kind of learning. If you’re going to start building a society where that stuff can’t very easily be taken care of at home, you need to start looking for [alternatives].

To me, cooking seems like one of those really basic skills that everybody should have; that’s part of literacy in terms of a broader sense of human existence. If we want people to eat healthfully and be engaged with their diets, the easiest way to do that is [by teaching them to cook], right? And then people can really be empowered to make decisions for themselves.

If you’re talking about a socioeconomic situation where people don’t have a lot of time to cook, and don’t necessarily have a lot of cooking knowledge, and you’re telling them they should be spending more time cooking, that’s not really fair. But if you’re creating a social fabric where there is lots of time and energy, that’s different. I draw some comparisons with the way industrialized nations in Europe structure their work and social time and vacation time. If I had five weeks’ guaranteed vacation every year, I’d be a lot more into canning the stuff out of my garden.

In each of the three places you lived and worked for the book, how representative would you say your experiences were?

It’s important for me to be very clear that, obviously, in a major sense, these experiences are only representative of what happens when I go and do what I did. Because, particularly in the farm work, I’m a white girl with papers — there’s no way the experience I had is entirely typical. I also write about this in the Applebee’s section: People were really excited and curious about having a white girl in the kitchen. There’s all this interesting stuff about being a white woman. It prompts exploitation, on some levels, but also a lot of protection and affection and curiosity … I do think that in communities where monetary resources are tight, people do a lot more for each other in terms of in-kind resources.

One point you make several times seems key to the discussion of healthy eating choices: When you’re working very hard, and you’re working a job that’s tiring, there’s an apathy that takes over and ultimately dictates the food you choose to eat. I think people in almost all circumstances will recognize that exhaustion and overwork leads them to be less careful with their diet. Is there an easy way of combating this?

I think you’re right that you’ll find this with everybody. Most people have been exhausted from working, no matter how rich they are. [When they hit that point,] they just think, “I don’t care what I eat.”

I do think that there’s a special quality to these very working-class jobs, though. I experienced this the most at Walmart, where you feel like you have so little control over anything in your life that it just seems ridiculous to say, “I’m going to be really positive and work really hard on my diet.”

This sounds a little touchy-feely, but one of the things that you need to have to eat well is a real drive to do it: a real sense that what you do matters, and your circumstances will change. When you’re working in these jobs where actually, you can work really, really, really hard, and your circumstances do not change, that sense of “I will work hard and nothing gets any better” pervades everything. You feel a kind of hopelessness setting in about everything in your life.

This is part of a larger argument that you’re making — that we can’t just change our attitude to food directly; we have to address all these other concerns before we get to the point where people choose what they’re going to eat.

Right. The deeper I got into doing this project, the more I began to believe that we shouldn’t just focus on talking about what we should be eating. My grandmother has been telling me since I was a kid, “Eat your vegetables.” I’ve found a lot of sustainable food stuff really inspiring and really exciting, but I really think that people already know about it. What we need to think about is, Why aren’t people doing it?

We’ve developed this approach to nutrition in the U.S. where we think that if you just tell people things in the right way, they’ll change their minds — that we need to persuade people to eat well. I don’t think that that’s the case. I think that you get a lot further by making it easy for people to make good decisions … If you make it easy for people to eat well, people mostly are going to do that. People are not running around saying, “I think diabetes is awesome and I want it.” Right now, it’s really easy to eat crappy food. So, why not make it easier not to?

Lastly, what would you say are the most surprising things — either alarming or encouraging — that you learned over the course of your experience?

There were two things that freaked me out the most. One was how totally unregulated farm labor is on the ground. I remember thinking, “Nobody is minding the shop here. Absolutely nobody.” I was getting paid completely illegal wages, and they were giving me paychecks that I could completely disprove if I felt like arguing about them. But even if anyone bothers to complain, the fines are really small — no one really cares.

The other alarming thing was the sense I got of the power of Walmart — how powerful a single company is in terms of our food system. They’re not just the ones selling the food; they’re the gatekeepers between farm and plate. They’re controlling the whole thing. It’s how they’ve brought prices down: not so much by pushing down producers’ prices, which they’ve done on manufactured goods a lot … more of the food price drop over time has been a drop in the price after the farm gate. We talk about the fact that banks are “too big to fail” — and that’s awful. But it scares me even more when we’re talking about food.

On the other hand, there were a bunch of things that I found really inspiring. I thought the generosity among the people that I worked and lived with everywhere was really amazing. There seems to be this myth — and this might be part of the way that I grew up — that everybody’s out there on their own: We’re individuals, and we just take care of our own stuff. But actually, people — particularly of limited means — are incredibly generous and kind, for the most part.

I came out of all of this feeling really hopeful. We can actually do this. This isn’t some huge monolith that’s impossible — we just have to decide that we want to take on the less sexy things. Let’s talk about food as part of infrastructure. If we could get people as excited about food infrastructure as they are about farmers’ markets, we’d get really far really fast.

This month, researchers found 230 out of 395 pork cuts bought in U.S. stores were contaminated with a super bug called MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). Worse — there were “no statistically significant differences” between “conventionally raised swine and swine raised without antibiotics,” reported the researchers.

Why would meat labeled “raised without antibiotics” be as full of super bugs as conventional and factory farmed meat? It can be contaminated with MRSA at the farm, by slaughterhouse workers who carry MRSA or by other meat, if processing equipment is not “cleaned out between runs of certified organic and non-certified organic meats,” say the researchers. A 2009 study of swine workers in Iowa and Illinois found that almost half carried MRSA.

And last month, the FDA scrapped its three-decade-long effort to regulate the use of the popular human antibiotics penicillin and tetracycline in livestock. While the FDA says in the announcement that it “remains concerned about the issue of antimicrobial resistance,” it also says “contested, formal withdrawal proceedings” consume too much of its time and money. For example, withdrawing nitrofurans from livestock use took 20 years, DES (diethylstilbestrol) took seven years and enrofloxacin took five years and cost $3.3 million, says the agency. Hey, we’re just the government that makes the laws and enforces them. They’re Big Meat!

Cynics might have seen the concession to Big Meat coming when a report from a USDA-contracted researcher that asserted that MRSA kills more Americans per year than AIDS “disappeared” from the National Agricultural Library Web site last summer with no explanation, says reporter Tom Philpott. Of course, MRSA is only one antibiotic-resistant germ and not even the one clinicians fear the most anymore. Clinicians also worry about vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE), encouraged by the use of the antibiotic virginiamycin in livestock; Clostridium difficile, a serious intestinal bug developing resistance; and resistant Acinetobacter baumannii which has so afflicted U.S. troops in Iraq it has been dubbed “Iraqibacter.”

And days after the penicillin announcement, there was another concession. The FDA issued new, watered down rules on the use of cephalosporins in livestock (a different type of antibiotic) after Big Meat muscled down the FDA’s original order to prohibit cephalosporins in 2008 (which also disappeared with little explanation). Cephalosporins are antibiotics like Cefzil and Keflex used for pneumonia, strep throat, salmonella and skin and urinary tract infections in humans and one type of antibiotic that Clostridium difficile is developing tolerance to. Over a million human salmonella infections occur in the U.S. every year, resulting in 16,000 people being hospitalized and nearly 600 deaths, reported the Harford Advocate.

In 2008, the FDA announced that there was “evidence that extralabel use of these drugs [cephalosporins] in food-producing animals will likely cause an adverse event in humans and, as such, presents a risk to the public health,” and called for their prohibition. Notice the FDA says “will likely cause” not “could likely cause” and “presents a risk” not “could present a risk”?

But by the time hearings were held two months later and lobbyists had worked their magic, the “Cephalosporin Order of Prohibition,” had somehow become a “Hearing to Review the Advances in Animal Health Within the Livestock Industry.” Prohibition — advances, same idea, right?

At the hearings, the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), the Animal Health Institute, a Big Pharma trade group and the egg, chicken, turkey, milk, pork and cattle industries whined that they could not “farm” without antibiotics because more feed would be required and the animals would get sick from being immobilized over their own manure.

“To raise turkeys without antibiotics would increase the incidence of illness in turkey flocks,” sniveled the National Turkey Federation’s Michael Rybolt. Antibiotics “reduce the level of potentially harmful bacteria which result in infections and sickness,” contended the National Milk Producers Federation Robert D. Byrne (key word, “potential”). Antibiotics decrease the amount of land needed to raise animals and provide a lower-priced “wholesome” product for the public, said one farm operator after another. One even claimed that manure is reduced because animals eat less. In their twisted thinking that would make factory farming green.

While most ag reps at the hearings defended the use of antibiotics for “treatment, prevention and control of disease,” the AVMA’s Christine Hoang actually went so far as to call the less feed that antibiotics make possible a “health-promoting” effect and a “therapeutic use.” Maybe she meant health and therapy for the bottom line.

After the hearings, W. Ron DeHaven, who was the USDA’s top vet before leaving for industry and helming the AVMA, penned a rambling, almost incoherent 18-page letter with 62 footnotes to the FDA. Cephalosporin-resistant “human pathogens” aren’t increasing, says the letter, and even if they are, they’re not affecting human health and even they’re affecting human health, how do you know it’s from the livestock drugs and even if it’s from the livestock drugs, the FDA has no legal authority to ban cephalosporin. Got that?

Alternately maudlin and accusatory, the letter plays on terrorism fears by calling a cephalosporin ban a “food security issue” affecting “the number of animals available for the food supply.” It also plays on humanitarian sentiments by claiming a ban would impede veterinarians’ ability “to relieve the pain and suffering of animals” as if cephalosporins are painkillers and other drugs aren’t available. (And as if antibiotics are given for animals’ welfare instead of revenue welfare.)

Nowhere in the letter is mention of the reason Big Meat won’t let go of antibiotics: The industry is able to raise thousands of animals in crowded conditions that would otherwise kill them for prices as “artificial” as the drugs they are raised on. Big Pharma’s invasion into farming is probably the biggest reason for the demise of family farms which are no longer able to compete in price.

But less than a month after the letter was sent, on November 25, the FDA quietly revoked the prohibition. Good hire, AVMA!

Of course, the revolving door between government/Big Pharma lobbying has a distinguished tradition from Louisiana representative-turned-lobbyist, Billy Tauzin, who presided over the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) until 2010, to former CDC Director Julie Gerberding, who presided over the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak and turned up as — anybody? — head of Merck vaccines when she left the government.

It was not a great surprise that the FDA’s new cephalosporin livestock rules, four years later, had the Agribusiness Seal of Approval. “We thought the original order was too broad and unnecessarily prohibited uses that were not likely to cause problems for human health,” said AVMA’s Dr. Hoang, perhaps tempted to take a bow.

The new rules, which no longer ban cephalosporins, limit “large and lengthy dosing in cattle and swine,” says the New York Times, but allow uses “the F.D.A. has not specifically approved,” and wide use in ducks and rabbits. Yum. Still, the new rules prohibit one unsavory factory farming practice that few are aware of–the “routine injections of cephalosporins into chicken eggs.”

In 2008, while inspecting egg operations, the FDA caught hatcheries injecting cephalosporins directly into chicken eggs, “rather than by the approved method of administering the drug to day-old chicks.” The same year, Tyson Foods was caught injecting eggs with a different antibiotic, the human antibiotic gentamicin, linked to serious side effects. Tyson especially had egg on its face, because the previous year the government disallowed its slogan “Raised Without Antibiotics,” because the ionophores it adds to poultry feed are antibiotics. Ionophores are antibiotics added to poultry and cattle feed for the same “feed efficiency” as produced with other antibiotics but they are not used in humans. Tyson had just backpedaled into the new phrase, “Raised Without Antibiotics That Impact Antibiotic Resistance In Humans,” when it was caught playing fast and loose with gentamicin. Oops.

Several scientific journals report that antibiotics injected into the eggs of layer hens before they hatch produce drug residues in the eggs they lay.

The abuse of antibiotics on farms was one of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s last stands. “It seems scarcely believable that these precious medications could be fed by the ton to chickens and pigs,” he wrote in a bill called the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2007 (PAMTA), which has yet to pass. “These precious drugs aren’t even used to treat sick animals. They are used to fatten pigs and speed the growth of chickens. The result of this rampant overuse is clear: meat contaminated with drug-resistant bacteria sits on supermarket shelves all over America,” said Kennedy years before this month’s report on MRSA-contaminated pork. The meat industry, “is rampantly misusing antibiotics in an attempt to cover up filthy, unsanitary living conditions among animals,” echoed Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., who cosponsored the bill and holds degrees in microbiology and public health.

Over 70 percent of antibiotics go to livestock, not people, says the bill and they are used on over 83 percent of grower-finisher swine farms, cattle feedlots, and sheep farms and found in 48 percent of U.S. streams.

Of course, it’s no surprise that Big Meat denies the dangers of antibiotic resistance and/or its part in it and opposes PAMTA. “We don’t believe we are the main cause of antibiotic resistance,” Dave Warner, the National Pork Producers Council’s communications director told Johns Hopkins Magazine. Doctors who overprescribe antibiotics are the culprit, claims Warner, since “There are only 67,000 pork producers.” Only?

The chicken industry also pleads innocent. “We believe our use is responsible and limited,” Richard Lobb, public relations director for the National Chicken Council, told the Hartford Advocate.

What is a surprise is that Big Pharma, supposed medical professionals, is also “flat earth” when it comes to antibiotic resistance. Elanco, the animal division of Eli Lilly, says that, “Monitoring antibiotic resistance in raw meat products is not an appropriate measure to represent the bacteria that reach the consumer,” in an online brochure, “because cooking destroys these bacteria, and dead bacteria cannot transmit antibiotic resistance.” Plus–who minds germs in their food if the germs are dead? Elanco also asserts, in the brochure, that livestock antibiotics keep occurrences of “food poisoning” down as if food poisoning were unrelated to farm conditions! In fact the size and industrialization of US factory farms is such a factor in food poisoning, it drove the passage of new federal food safety laws in 2010.

The Animal Health Institute, representing Abbott, Bayer Healthcare, Boehringer Ingelheim Vetmedica, Elanco/Lilly, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer is even more flat earth.

“There is no scientific evidence that antibiotics used in food animals have any significant impact on the effectiveness of antibiotics in people,” it deadpans in a brochure created specifically to oppose PAMTA. “People would be more likely to die from a bee sting than for their antibiotic treatment to fail because of…resistant bacteria in meat or poultry.” But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that hospital-associated infections, which are likely to be antibiotic resistant, cause or contribute to 99,000 deaths each year. Under 100 people die a year from all stinging insects.

And AVMA? “At the heart of this discussion is the premise that the use of antibiotics in animal agriculture directly contributes to bacterial resistance in humans,” says the vet group, urging its members to fight PAMTA. A livestock antibiotic ban in Denmark, “has not shown any clear declines in antibiotic resistance patterns in humans,” says AVMA, though CBS News and Food Safety News find otherwise.

Antibiotic resistant intestinal infections increased in Europe after certain antibiotics were introduced on farms, reported CBS. But after Denmark declared a ban, it “drastically reduced antibiotic-resistant bacteria in animals and food.” The Denmark’s Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries reported that the ban resulted in “overall reductions of antimicrobial resistance countrywide,” said Food Safety News.

Nor is AVMA the only veterinary group that sides with industry over animals. The American Association of Swine Veterinarians was one of the groups filing a friend-of-the-court brief supporting this week’s Supreme Court ruling, National Meat Association v. Harris, that overturned California’s humane slaughter law. The law was enacted after the 2008 Westland/Hallmark school lunch meat scandal in which cows too sick and weak to walk were videotaped forklifted and “water-boarded” to the slaughter line. The humane slaughter law prohibits buying, selling or receiving downer animals and processing, butchering or selling them for human consumption. It requires non-ambulatory animals to be immediately euthanized.

Big Meat and its veterinarians argued the California law “criminalizes” the work of federal slaughterhouse inspectors who are presumably preventing slaughterhouse atrocities without the California law’s help. But former USDA inspectors Lester Friedlander, DVM and Dean Wyatt, DVM have testified that federal inspection is a mockery that puts the public at risk at the same time it permits appalling animal abuse.

In fact, antibiotics form such a huge part of Big Pharma revenues, antibiotic resistance literally divides medical professionals along species lines. Many medical groups, including the American Medical Association and the American Public Health Association, support PAMTA out of concern for patient infections while big veterinary groups tend to oppose it.

At first it looked like PAMTA might have a friend in the FDA’s newly appointed deputy commissioner, Joshua Sharfstein, who was a pediatrician and the former food safety staffer for Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. Both he and the newly appointed FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, had public health backgrounds and were not industry insiders.

At a 2009 House Rules Committee meeting, Sharfstein surprised lawmakers by indicating that the FDA supported PAMTA. The ag lobby was enraged because Sharfstein’s remarks implied White House Office of Management and Budget approval, yet there had been no briefing.

“You deliberately tried to blindside some of us on this committee, and we don’t appreciate that,” barked Rep. Leonard Boswell, D-Iowa, former House agriculture subcommittee on livestock chairman, to Michael Taylor, FDA senior adviser on food safety (considered a friend of agribusiness, until the Sharfstein remarks).

But by early 2011, Kennedy had died, Sharfstein had left the FDA abruptly and without comment, and Big Meat had already showed lawmakers where they could put their cephalosporin ban. Congress seemed to have little appetite left to go up against Big Meat.

So it’s no surprise that in 2012, the FDA is waving through major livestock antibiotics, attaching Mickey Mouse restrictions on others, and U.S. meat is full of super bugs — even meat labeled “raised without antibiotics.”

But Jordan doesn’t take the credit. The secret to her booming business, she says, is instead a complex and seemingly rather dull legal contract called an agricultural easement. The arrangement, made with a land trust, allows farmers to be paid in return for stripping their land of its development rights – no new subdivisions or shopping malls allowed – and instead keeping it as farmland. In 2004, the Jordan family placed 47 acres of their property under an easement with the Cape Elizabeth Land Trust for an undisclosed sum. “The Jordans settled Cape Elizabeth,” Jordan says. “We would not have kept the farm, let alone been able to invest in the business, without this.”

Interest in small-scale agriculture has soared over the last decade. But it’s still anything but easy for farmers to get in or stay in the game, not least because farmland itself is disappearing: In Maine, for example, 75 percent of farmland has vanished since 1950. What’s left is often worth more as future house lots than as a farm—especially if it has panoramic views like the Jordan farm. Over the next decade, about 400,000 acres, or about one-third of Maine’s remaining farmland, will be in transition as older farmers retire or die. Here in the Pine Tree State, agricultural easements are an increasingly powerful tool to help revive and grow small farms.

John Bliss and Stacy Brenner have built their business – a 150-member CSA, a farm stand and flower design studio – thanks to an agricultural easement. Their 150-acre Broadturn Farm is actually owned by the local Scarborough Land Trust, which leases it “at a very modest rent” to the young couple. Bliss and Brenner are your stereotypical new farmers. They’re young, business savvy and hip – you can just picture them sampling cheese and sipping a craft brew at a bar in Brooklyn – and neither of them grew up farming. (Plus, if either of them decides to give up on farming, they have a future as models for J. Crew.)

Over the next decade, about one-third of Maine’s remaining farmland will be in transition as older farmers retire or die.

After apprenticing for a few years, Bliss and Brenner learned enough to want to set out on their own. But had they bought the land they currently occupy, it would have cost $750,000 and one of them would have had to take an off-farm job to pay the mortgage. “This is an arrangement where we have an affordable rent and we can reinvest in our business, not the real estate,” says Brenner.

In Damariscotta, about an hour north, the Maine Farmland Trust, a state preservation non-profit, purchased a 67-acre farm for $500,000 along the state’s main thoroughfare, Route 1. Its plan: To sell it for less than half that to the local food co-op, Rising Tide, or to a new farmer. It’s an example of what the Trust calls a “Buy, Protect, Sell” program, which has preserved 3,000 acres of farmland since it was launched in 2008. “Buy high, sell low doesn’t seem like a good business plan. But to preserve land, it makes sense,” says John Piotti, the Trust’s executive director.

Initially, the farm’s owner planned to sell the land to Wal-Mart. But the community revolted, and the deal was abandoned. Concerned that the land would still be developed, the Trust purchased the land and put an easement on the property. The easement payments, which come from federal and state agencies, plus private fundraising, will allow the Trust to sell the acreage at the farmland value, $180,000, and still just about break even.

For the Jordans, an easement was their ticket to stay on the farm, which was experiencing financial issues. Money had been diverted from the business to help pay for family health care, among other things, and there were overdue bills and unpaid taxes.

The money the Jordans received for the easement allowed the family to make a substantial capital investment in the farm. They almost doubled the number of acres under cultivation, from 40 to 70. They built a new three-room farmstand, where at this time of year you might find squash, shell beans, kale, salad greens, beets, eggs, apples, cider and maple syrup. Retail sales, which are far more profitable for farms, now make up 90 percent of the family’s business.

Business certainly was brisk on a recent sunny autumn afternoon. Older couples parked their cars and greeted sales staff by name. Mothers piled apples and greens in their baskets and appeased their children with pumpkins stacked on a bale of hay by the door. “Writing an easement – it was the hardest process. But it forced the family to confront the hard decisions that had to be made,” says Jordan. “And that’s what saved the farm.”

The flavor has been the subject of more hot rumors than a Jennifer Aniston pregnancy ever since “SNL” alum Ana Gasteyer casually let the news slip in an interview with NY1. In the world of “SNL,” the balls are the holiday treats of one Pete Schweddy (Alec Baldwin), who tells his NPR “Delicious Dish” hosts that “the thing I most like to bring out at this time of the year are my balls.” As he explains, “No one can resist my Schweddy Balls.”

But will real-life consumers go for a flavor with a connotation that sounds like it could be redubbed Funky Jockeys? Ben & Jerry’s spokesman Sean Greenwood told Time Wednesday, “We’re not trying to offend people. Our fans get the humor.” And the flavor, “vanilla ice cream with a hint of rum loaded with fudge-covered rum and malt balls,” does sound like a festive treat. After all, what goes better with a big Yule log than some nice Balls? 

Baldwin told Time that he’s delighted to see “Ben & Jerry’s and Schweddy. Two great names in American dessert, together at last,” while Gasteyer admitted, “As a person and a performer, I am a sucker for holiday balls.” Just grab the Balls while you can — Ben & Jerry’s is only rolling the flavor out through the holidays. But even long after you’re no longer Schweddy, at least you’ll still be able to keep plunging your tongue into their Cinnamon Buns.

As a kid, I saw nothing odd about the relationship between my mother and McDonald’s. The McDonald’s our family knew was a force for good: Traveler’s helpmeet, employer of scrofulous teens, international promoter of clean toilets, and valiant opponent of illegitimate royalist upstart Burger King. On road trips, we would rather be found dead of starvation in our Chrysler Voyager than eat at Burger King. As we passed one, somebody in our family might talk about “a friend of a friend” who ate a Whopper and died. Until I was at least a teenager, I possessed the unexamined belief that Burger King was evil. Not a worse burger-purveyor; evil. Evil like East Germans in Cold War movies. And so we never questioned why McDonald’s, the Good Guys, would call our mother to its mysterious academy every year.

I was eight when she started, old enough to understand that “Hamburger U.” referenced the McDonald’s menu but not old enough to find it even remotely silly. My father taught at a university, and so I imagined Hamburger U. as a bustling academy, a place where the Hamburglar wasn’t a petty thief but a tenured professor, his cape billowing like a Cambridge don’s as he crossed campus. My sister reports having made the same categorical assumption: “Princeton, Yale, Hamburger.” In some ways my fantasy was right. Fact: My mother holds a McDonald’s “Bachelor of Hamburgerology.”

Over time, the McDonald’s logo suffused our home. We had so many branded notepads and folders that I always half-expected to find meat grilling next to the binders at Office Max. One year, my mother came home from Hamburger U. with a takeout McDonald’s bag. When I reached to unfurl its rolled lip, my fingers tapped against porcelain: It turned out to be a trompe l’oeil sculpture — hard, gleaming proof of the wizardry practiced at the meat-themed Oz where my mother worked. My mother felt legitimately privileged to be able to order these kinds of exclusive McDonald’s merchandise. “The windbreakers were very high quality,” she said once, “but I just didn’t need a windbreaker.” Not at issue: that the garment would be blasted with McDonald’s branding, maybe printed with a picture of a Big Mac, all-beef patty glistening under the baritone script “SPECIAL SAUCE.” That was the image on our playing cards.

Exclusive merchandise was just one of the perks that awaited my mother at Hamburger U. She was invited to participate in tastings at the lab, and I imagined her blindfolded, a man in a toque coaxing language from her: “Can you describe the base note in the McSauce? More black currant or burnt leather?” My younger sister mistrusted McDonald’s’ use of our mother as a guinea pig, though, particularly after one year when, as my sister recalls, “They made mommy eat a styrofoam hamburger box. I remember. She said it was ‘just OK.’” My mother doesn’t remember this episode, but would not rule it out.

The truth was she loved her weeks at Hamburger U., steaming in the campus sauna with the Finns, hiking on the wooded campus trails. “There was a beautiful lake you passed on the way to the conference center… it always had ducks on it,” she recalled recently. A moment later: “I think the ducks were plastic.”

She was talking about Lake Fred, an artificial lake named for Fred Turner, CEO from 1973 to 1987. I’ve been to the campus. The ducks are either plastic or really well trained. Either way, did you know there are 187,000 lakes in Finland, and that Finland is often called “The Land of a Thousand Lakes”? Looking at Lake Fred, with its simpleton’s oval border and bobbing decoys, you would expect a Finn to say, “Oh I’ve seen lakes! This is no lake, this is a bath drawn for a baby.” And yet, Lake Fred impresses my mother.

I guess it’s possible that my mother, through annual incantations of the training manual, accidentally indoctrinated herself with company loyalty, but I think that’s not quite it. Even 12 years into her career, she was captivated by figures like Turner and Ray Kroc, whose stories she’d translated in the curriculum’s “History” lessons. She doesn’t tire of telling you that Fred Turner started as a grill operator and rose his way up in the ranks one grueling, fat-splattered station at a time. Or that Ray Kroc, the milkshake machine vender who began to build McDonald’s at age 56, never shied away from doing anything himself. “If he saw a dirty table, he took a rag and cleaned it,” she’ll say, admiringly. In her eyes, Ray Kroc, rather than the profit-chasing grandfather of the global spread of fast food, is on the contrary a kind of honorary Finn, a humble egalitarian with a rag in his belt, always ready to get his hands as dirty as the new hire’s.

And yet, Finland hasn’t been McDonald’s’ easiest market: In both franchise number and overall sales, McDonald’s is second to Finland’s indigenous fast-food chain, Hesburger, a company whose roots are in Turku, my mother’s hometown. Probably outdone by Hesburger, the big McDonald’s on the central market square in Turku is closed now, but it was a franchise we knew well. In addition to regular summer rituals like foraging for chanterelles by the moose-paths in the woods or lying out on my grandfather’s dock, still tanning at 8 pm in the endless arctic sun, we went to that McDonald’s at least once a summer. My siblings and I looked forward to accompanying my mother as she got V.I.P. treatment from her former trainees at every McDonald’s in Finland, flanking her like guards attending Steven Spielberg at The Ivy while the solicitous manager would give us a mansikkapirtelö (strawberry milkshake) on the house and asked if the tuplajuustohampurilainen (double cheeseburger) was up to code.

At this Turku franchise, my mother once worked a shift as an entry-level crew member as part of her own training. She manned the McFlurry machine to cut down on order-filling time, noticed the ladies’ room was a mess and wheeled out a mop. “I felt very useful, I had done some good things,” she commented after, the ghost of Ray Kroc’s table-rag hanging in her rough, capable hands.

There’s a certain point at which the children of immigrants have to give up trying to understand their parents’ strange and selective relationship with America. All I want is her Finnish childhood, her herring-fed herding dog, the romance of my Finnish summers year-round. And meanwhile, she wants to learn how to shave seven seconds off a lunch order at the Turku McDonald’s.

But sometimes, she drops clues. About her own childhood, she remembers never hearing the words “hyvää päivänjatkoa” said by Finns to one another. Her theory is that only with the arrival of McDonald’s in Finland, and with it, Ray Kroc’s requirement that every customer be greeted politely, did Finns, traditionally so stingy with their words, warm up to the expression. It means “Have a nice day.”

Julia Langbein is a writer based in Chicago. She has written for Artforum.com, New York Magazine’s Grub Street blog, Gourmet magazine and gourmet.com. She is also a Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Chicago, where she’s writing a dissertation about satiric art criticism, which is something that used to exist.