The Filet-O-Fish Says So Much About Growing Up Muslim

Welcome to #NotAnAd, where we post enthusiastically and without reservation about things we’re obsessed with from the world of food. Last week, I went through the old Asian horror story of travelling with my family to an out-of-town wedding. Packed into the car on the journey back, all of us festooned in new clothes and slowly melting makeup, we observed a time-honoured food tradition I’ll no doubt pass on to my eventual offspring: the stop-off at McDonald’s.

They’re like coming home, those big yellow arches. The gates you have to pass under to reach ambrosia. A stop at McDonald’s on the journey back from any large family gathering makes the sting of gossip, all the ways you’ve disappointed your parents, and the pain of having to wear high heels for hours feel better. I love the Filet-O-Fish for this reason. The plainest burger in the world. The comfort food of all comfort foods. The most convenient item on the McDonald’s menu if you’re Muslim.

Without it, the fast food chain would be nothing but a meat show: an endless buffet of non-Halal chicken wraps, Big Macs, and whoppers with cheese between bits of fried pig; each one a testament to the concept of a barbecue-flavoured calorie.

I always got a strangely democratic vibe from the Ronald McDonald of those 90s television adverts. As if he were the sales-clown for a place where everyone could enjoy a burger, regardless of religion. Because, hey, what do we all have in common under capitalism if not tastebuds and a desire to eat whatever we want, whenever we want? The Filet-O-Fish encapsulates this. A 1962 invention of Lou Groen, a McDonald’s franchise owner from Cincinnati, Ohio, the burger was a response to falling hamburger sales on Fridays, the day when Groen’s majority-Catholic neighbourhood abstained from eating meat. And so, the saving grace for the scripturally adjacent was born.

If you watch a bunch of people go into McDonalds at the same time from, say, a dimly lit car with wedding heels kicked under the seats, parked at a service station just off the M62, it’s pretty easy to guess what they’ll order. The same goes for the group of hijabis and the brown kid wailing in the stroller, or the dad driving the Volkswagen with kids happily talking over him in the backseat, who jogs over to the counter.

The pleasingly steamed bun. The little slab of cheese. The (usually completely off-centre) dollop of tartare sauce on the certified Alaskan pollock fillet, flaky and fried and supposedly the star of the whole thing. The Filet-O-Fish is simple. It’s fast food, but it has the capacity to satisfy the old and the young, and the humbleness to appeal to the marginal vote because that’s exactly who it’s supposed to appeal to.

In our world so stuffed to the brim with food, however, there are critics who say the Filet-O-Fish tastes like nothing. That the bun isn’t pleasingly steamed—it’s off-puttingly squidgy. The cheese topping is tiny, and not properly melted. Someone could’ve taken more care with the tartare sauce. The pollock’s tough in a bad way. Who on earth would willingly eat that, no less make a habit of it?

Well, lots of people. Lots of people who know that the Filet-O-Fish doesn’t try to be something it’s not. In fact, it recognises its biggest, most marginal of fans, and says, “I am to be eaten by you, and you will eat me, because literally nothing on this menu is Halal and I know you’re gonna get into an argument with that know-it-all Ruqaiyah at mosque tomorrow because no one is completely sure whether they fry me in the same oil as the bacon that goes on top of The Tennessee Stack.”

I know racial profiling is bad, and there’s nothing intrinsically Muslim about the Filet-O-Fish, but by this point, it has become part of our food tradition. A compromise made up of being Western and a practising Muslim, all in one. A collaborative effort from Lou Groen and the first Muslim kid who ordered it.

Does the Filet-O-Fish taste good? Yeah. Maybe not the food to praise with a “mashallah,” but yeah. It does.