Harvey’s is a Canadian fast-food chain that makes your hamburgers a beautiful thing © and we dream about the processed taste of their beef patties at the start of every week.
Harvey’s is s-tier college sustenance. It is for two a.m. cravings, drunk and delirious. It is for finals season, engaged in survival mode. It is convenience and efficiency in the form of two angus burgers and fries, barely chewed, guzzled back with coke.
Harvey’s is a will to live. It is the reward for submitted lab reports and back-to-back midterms and meeting the word count. The end is foreseeable and it will taste of onions. Of weird spongey textures in our mouths. Of the savoury and the meaty. Tangy with ketchup and eggy with mayo.
Will it ever be like this again? When we grow old and come home to our glasses of wine, our well-balanced-high-protein-gluten-free meals? The beef is grass-fed and the bread will go stale overnight as it should. We will use serums on our skin and read books before bed.
We are all sat around the dining table sharing onion rings at midnight and I am not ready to say goodbye to this. I want forever the words preservatives and azodicarbonamide and sodium phosphate and dimethylpolysiloxane to mean nothing to me. I need Harvey’s to retain its magic because once it doesn’t, I’m scared the loneliness will be astounding.
In middle school, we walked to the Mac’s convenience store across the street and when it was hot we would buy $2 slushies filled to the brim, layered with all the flavours. It was liquid sugar and dye that turned our tongues blue.
The Mac’s on the intersection of 40th and 119th is now a Circle K and I have not slurped a slushie in ten years because artificial flavouring leaves a weird aftertaste in my mouth. Someone is a nurse and someone else is in grad school and someone else is partying on balconies in Singapore and I am 3000 kilometres in the other direction writing a love letter to Harvey’s.
So one day, I will stop putting Harvey’s on a pedestal, but we managed to make something out of the unassuming. We took the fluorescent lights and fried oil smells and chipped linoleum tile and wove it into memories. The empty calories and yeet hay became laughter. It’s a gift to our future selves — this wistful feeling, this sentimental yearning to hold onto something fleeting. It’s nostalgia.