I want to start off by saying that in no means did I mean to offend anyone in this piece, and that I am fully aware of my own privilege and the fact that for many families McDonald’s would be a luxury.

However, I believe you are severely misinterpreting my piece. While you stated that I deigned McDonald’s, if anything I believe my piece (and certainly my own feelings) were about confronting my own privilege and realizing that McDonald’s was not beneath me or something I should snidely disregard.

As I described myself as an upper middle class white kid at the start of the third paragraph (which I believe qualifies as “acknowledging my privilege from the offset”), I went on to describe that for the way I was raised, McDonald’s was frequently framed as something inherently wrong. Through reading the immigrant’s story and the other articles I linked to, I was forced to acknowledge my own privilege (the “twice in my life” line) as well as the value McDonald’s has among less privileged communities.

My actual eating of the Big Mac was not meant to be (and I do not believe I framed it as) an “experiment,” but rather a spur of the moment decision to address my own hypocrisy. My “just to try it” attitude, something which I acknowledge I can only have because of my privilege, I deemed to be hypocritical in that I would try weird and exotic foods but had never had what many people consider to be a normal meal or even a luxury.

While one could certainly argue that my piece failed at articulating the ideas it aimed to convey (that of me trying to correct my previously smug attitude toward McDonald’s), I believe that my piece accurately acknowledged my own privilege, and in no way did I intend to take away the dignity of the less fortunate.