What would John Wayne say?
After years of passionate debate, a County Commission resolution and a governor’s jawboning, come Monday the famed Heart Buster Burger will no longer be on the cafeteria menu at the Orange County Medical Center south of Los Angeles.
“Hallelujah! Sanity finally prevails,” said Orion Lovelace, chairman of the Orange County chapter of the National Union of Food Police. “That dreadful piece of so-called cuisine has been an embarrassment and a health threat for far too many years. Good riddance.”
Not everyone shares Lovelace’s enthusiasm, Louis Herkenhorn, for example.
“I’ve volunteered here for more than twenty years and usually three days a week,” he said. “Every one of those days I’ve had Heart Buster for lunch and look at me, seventy-six years old and healthy as an ox. How can they say that hamburger is bad for you?”
Legend has it that John Wayne dreamed up the Heart Buster burger three decades ago during a stay as a patient. He wanted a hamburger and cajoled the food service director into preparing him a special creation: two hamburger patties, two slices of Stilton cheese, three strips of bacon, lettuce, tomatoes, onion, pickles, all on a large kaiser roll slathered with mayonnaise, ketchup and thousand island salad dressing.
Within a few days, the John Wayne Heart Buster Burger was on the cafeteria menu. After Wayne’s death, his name came off the menu, but the burger stayed. Its fame spread to the point that burger aficionados with no reason to be at the hospital regularly came to the cafeteria to consume one.
Before long, the Heart Buster — pegged at 3,200 calories by hospital dieticians — had become a profit center for the hospital.
But in the late 1980s, healthy diet advocates took aim at the burger, citing the clear link between fatty diets and heart disease. The battle was joined: healthy eaters vs. free will. A medical center president of that era famously summed up the issue: “We don’t serve the Heart Buster to patients. If you want one, you have to be healthy enough to walk through the cafeteria. If you want to eat yourself to death, that’s your business.”
Then three years ago, Ms. Lovelace formed a local chapter of the National Union of Food Police. She began appearing at every meeting of the Orange County Commissioners. She chained herself to a railing in the cafeteria and was arrested by hospital police. She organized picket lines outside the hospital. Recently, she began lobbying California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
No one will talk about it, including Ms. Orion, but lobbying the governor apparently worked. Someone in Sacramento placed a call to a member, or members, of the county commission. Last week, the commission adopted — without discussion — a unanimous resolution that the Heart Buster Burger shall no longer be served effective April 23.
Hospital cafeteria workers are preparing for long lines of Heart Buster devotees seeking a final burger over the weekend. “I’ll bet we serve a thousand of them,” said a cafeteria staff member who asked not to be identified. “You can bet I’ll eat a farewell burger myself.”