Some people do food challenges for the clicks. This guy did one for the timeline. MSN covered the whole thing, and it's exactly the kind of project I wish I'd thought of first. Nick DiGiovanni's video is titled "I Ate 100 Years of McDonald's," which is a great title and also a bit of creative rounding, since the company traces itself back to 1940, when Richard and Maurice McDonald opened up in San Bernardino, California. That makes McDonald's about 86 years old. Still, eating your way through eight and a half decades of menu history, era by era, and watching American fast food change shape right there on the tray? I'll allow the round number.

Because it did change, dramatically. The early McDonald's and today's operation share a name and not much more. Per the project's telling, the early menu was a short list of burgers, fries, shakes and pie, and the whole revolutionary idea was speed: no carhops, no waiting, just a tight assembly line. Which, if you've read me before, you know I love. A handful of things done well beats twenty things done medium, and early McDonald's is maybe the ultimate proof.

Then the project walks the decades forward and the story basically writes itself. The Filet-O-Fish shows up, and the video credits its invention to Catholic customers who wanted a meatless option. Later come the bigger sandwiches, the chicken, the salads, the portion creep, and eventually the modern era, where the menu has to answer for itself on price and nutrition in a way the original stand never did. Watching someone eat it in sequence, you stop seeing a menu and start seeing a running record of what America wanted food to be: fast, cheap, familiar, then faster, then somehow artisanal again.

The interesting part isn't the nostalgia, though there's plenty. It's tasting the inflection points. You can read about how the recipes and portions evolved, but eating it in order turns a timeline into something you can actually taste. That's the whole appeal of the format, and DiGiovanni commits to it.

I've done a much smaller version of this by accident. I once ate at a McDonald's in Hanoi and then, two days later, at one off a highway in Ohio, and the contrast rearranged my whole understanding of the word "global." Same golden arches, completely different relationship to the food around them. The Vietnam one had a rice dish I still think about; the Ohio one had a fry cook who called me "hon." Both were correct.

And that's why McDonald's works as a subject. It's easy to be snobby about it and I refuse. I wrote a whole piece about how the drive-thru breakfast became America's morning ritual and I meant every word, because fast food is a genuine part of how this country eats, for better and occasionally worse. Decades of it are decades of America deciding, meal by meal, what dinner should look like.

Would I eat through the whole history myself? Eighty-six years, one tray at a time? I've made worse decisions with a rental car. Somebody had to do it. I'm just glad it was him and not my arteries.