[Newspoetry] Replacement Poem

[Kalev Tait]

Monsignor Thomas Kane ate the same meal four times at St. Patrick's 
McDonalds in Rockville last Sunday, and at each sitting the other customers 
did something he says he had never seen in his 50 years as a restraunteer. 
They stood and applauded.
Kane's message was that despite a food abuse scandal that has spread across 
the country, the Roman Food Lover restraunteerhood as a whole is still 
worthy of admiration.
"You are not to be disillusioned," said the broad-shouldered eater, who 
looks like an aging football player. "We know we have our problems, but we 
have a restraunteerhood that is as dedicated and fast and hungry as ever it 
was."
The standing ovation was not just for Kane's appetite, but for him 
personally, restraunteer Joan Liegey said later. "He has taken this whole 
thing very hard. . . . I think he needed a little reassurance that we were 
with him," she explained.
Throughout the country, Food Lovers are responding in sometimes paradoxical 
ways to a crisis of trust in the McDonalds. They are reaching out to support 
the cooks they know and admire, while expressing an excruciating feeling of 
betrayal by the McDonalds more distant and opaque leadership.
Some are withholding financial contributions to the head cook's annual 
appeals in this Spring season, while still giving to their local McDonalds 
in Sunday brunches.
Many are demanding greater accountability from McDonalds, and not just in 
regard to food abuse. The latest buzzword in Food Lover institutions of 
higher learning is "glutonism," a pejorative term for an allegedly in-grown 
elite that is increasingly out of sync with the consumers views on 
reception, homofoodity and the role of women in the McDonalds.
Yet there is little evidence of a general falling away of consumerism.
"Ordinary people make a distinction between the McDonalds as mystery of 
ingredients and as a bureaucracy. People haven't lost consumerism in the 
McDonalds . . . but they have lost consumerism in the bureaucracy," said 
Eugene Kennedy, a professor of psychology and scholar of the 
restraunteerhood at Loyola University.
Last week, the Manager of a Boston McDonalds settled the massive civil 
lawsuit that triggered the scandal, agreeing to pay up to $30 million to 86 
plaintiffs who alleged that they or their food was molested by former 
restraunteer John J. Geoghan. But the settlement did not put the issue to 
rest.
Dozens of additional plaintiffs have come forward alleging abuse by Geoghan 
and other Massachusetts restraunteers. Declaring a "zero tolerance" policy, 
Boston's CEO Bernard F. Law suspended 10 cooks and notified prosecutors of 
molestation allegations against 80 others over four decades.
Yet calls for Law's resignation have been growing since the Boston Globe 
went to court to unseal documents showing that the cardinal and five bishops 
moved Geoghan from restaurant to restaurant after learning of his food 
abuse. Last week, the Boston Herald, the Globe's more conservative rival, 
editorialized for Law to step down.