COLUMN ONE : American Culture on a Bun : At 25, the Big Mac is an icon of high cholesterol and lowbrow fare. Its strongest selling point, many believe, is not its decadence or power to satisfy, but its steadfast, if squishy, sameness.

It was born a mere burger.

In 1968, when America first tasted the double-decker called Big Mac, the world barely batted an eye. Back then, uttering the phrase “two all-beef patties” did not prompt children to break into song. It was a simpler time, when people just said Thousand Island dressing, not “special sauce,” and the public saw McDonald’s wide-bodied, tomato-less concoction as a sandwich--nothing more.

But 25 years later, thanks to relentless marketing and global expansion, Big Mac has come to mean much more than lunch. Today, the world’s most popular sandwich is as recognizable as Mickey Mouse, as ubiquitous as Coke. More than 14 billion Big Macs have been sold in 66 countries. And no matter where it’s assembled, the squishy, salty sandwich always goes down the same way.

“With so few icons left that you can really depend on . . . it’s dependable--one less surprise in a world filled with unpleasant surprises,” said Eugene Secunda, a marketing professor at Adelphi University in New York. “It’s part of the mythic culture of America.”

“It’s the Paul Bunyan of hamburgers,” said Larry Orenstein, an advertising consultant who helped make the Big Mac famous. “It’s an American institution, like Johnny Appleseed.”

Like any standard-bearer, Big Mac has borne a heavy burden. In its short lifetime, it’s been dissected, deconstructed and vilified. Thanks to President Clinton, it is fodder for comedians. (“Anyone who says Clinton doesn’t inhale,” goes one joke, “never saw him around a Big Mac.”) Worse, it is held up as a symbol of the deterioration of everything from mass culture to eating habits.

“No single brand-name food has clogged more heart arteries,” said Phil Sokolof of the National Heartsavers Assn. “It has made many bypass surgeons and morticians independently wealthy.”

But today, as Americans who can’t remember life before the Big Mac threaten to outnumber those who can, its cultural significance has far surpassed its gastronomic value (500 calories, including 26 grams of fat and 100 milligrams of cholesterol).

So what if some people think the Big Mac is yucky? It is also intrinsically American. And because of that, it has a loyal following of grease junkies, gourmands and scholars.

“No one buys a Big Mac for the simple reason of eating it,” said Michael R. Steele, whose anthropological essay about McDonald’s is included in the book “Ronald Revisited: The World of Ronald McDonald.”

“Instead, the behavior is part of an entire gestalt in which the consumer participates on a subliminal level,” Steele wrote. “The purchase of a Big Mac involves a ‘deep’ interior perception of self, family, country and socioeconomic status. Along with a Big Mac, a consumer ‘buys’ a vision of himself at leisure on a well-deserved break; a vision of family cohesiveness . . . (and) a particular type of patriotism.”

All that for just $1.99? And to think that it began right here.

“The Big Mac is, unfortunately, Southern California’s greatest culinary contribution to the world,” said Jonathan Gold, who writes the Counter Intelligence restaurant column for The Times. “Just as with movies, it proves we know what’s popular.”

Richard and Maurice (Mac) McDonald moved to Hollywood from New Hampshire in the summer of 1928. Their dream was to own a chain of movie houses, but their first theater in Glendora drew smaller crowds than the nearby hot dog stand. They took the hint, opening a typical Southern California drive-in with carhop service and 35-cent burgers.

Then in 1948, they revolutionized the way Americans eat out.

“We wondered what would happen if we sold almost nothing else but hamburgers, cut the price to 15 cents, eliminated carhop service, reduced the staff . . . got rid of plates, forks, knives and tipping, and just made the whole thing a cheap, efficient operation where people wouldn’t have to wait,” Richard McDonald, 84, says in Jeffrey Tennyson’s new book, “Hamburger Heaven: The Illustrated History of the Hamburger.”

By the time a milkshake salesman named Ray Kroc bought McDonald’s in 1961, more than 100 franchisees were peddling burgers around the nation.

The McDonald brothers had laid the foundation, but it took another Southern California entrepreneur to build the burger that would beget the Big Mac.

In the 1930s, Bob Wian owned a popular hamburger stand in Glendale. One night in 1937, when a regular customer asked him for “something different for a change,” Wian carved a sesame seed bun into three slices, placed two patties between them and finished it off with lettuce, cheese and relish.

The sandwich, dubbed the Bob’s Big Boy, was an instant hit. Word of the unusually built burger and its pudgy-cheeked, overall-clad mascot spread quickly. Soon, according to Tennyson, the hamburger expert, “double-decker burgers were as common as bunk beds at summer camp, and rotund little ‘Burger Boy’ mascots were everywhere, as Big Boy begat Chubby Boy, Hi-Boy, Bun Boy, Beefy Boy, Country Boy, Brawny Boy, Husky Boy, Yumi Boy, Lucky Boy, Super Boy and several hundred other variations on the theme.”

But the descendant that would outshine them all would not make his appearance until the 1960s--three decades after the Big Boy’s birth. Jim Delligatti, a onetime Southern Californian operating McDonald’s restaurants in Pittsburgh, Pa., wanted to broaden his customer base by offering larger, adult fare. The double-decker leaped to mind.

“This wasn’t like discovering the light bulb,” Delligatti said. “The bulb was already there. All I did was screw it in the socket.”

Convincing McDonald’s higher-ups that he should be allowed to diversify was not easy. Back then, the McDonald’s menu was brief, one veteran grillman said: “Hamburger, cheeseburger, double cheese, french fries, milkshakes, Coke, orange and root beer, with grilled cheese on Friday for the Catholics.” Conventional wisdom cautioned against moving beyond the basics. But Delligatti kept pushing.

It took two years to get permission, and even then, there were limits. According to John F. Love’s 1986 book, “McDonald’s Behind the Arches,” McDonald’s decreed that the Big Mac would be tested at one store and be built with a standard bun. Delligatti ignored the latter caveat, ordering an oversize sesame seed bun, cut in thirds.

Within a few months, the Big Mac had boosted sales in Delligatti’s store by 12%. Within a year, in 1968, McDonald’s added the so-called “seven-course meal” to the menu in all its stores and marketed it with the biggest national advertising campaign it had mounted up to that time.

The success of the Big Mac, which initially cost 49 cents, started a spate of experiments that further expanded McDonald’s menu. Soon, inventive franchisees had created the Hot Apple Pie in Knoxville, Tenn., the Egg McMuffin in Santa Barbara, and the Filet-o-Fish in Cincinnati.

Scott Allmendinger, editor of Restaurant Business magazine, says the Big Mac changed the fast-food industry forever. In its wake, simple fare was simply no longer enough.

“When you see a Monterey Chicken Sandwich at Wendy’s, this is really where it started,” he said. The Big Mac “proved that tinkering with the basic formula could have a true business payoff. (It’s) the forefather of menu diversification.”

Even the best new product, however, was nothing without one essential ingredient: promotion. Orenstein, the ad man, remembers being summoned in 1969 to create a powerful ad campaign celebrating the Big Mac’s first birthday. Even then, he says, the burger was marketed as an American institution.

He and his colleagues at D’Arcy Advertising created an ad featuring singer Hoyt Axton climbing a mountain as he strummed his guitar and sang “The Ballad of Big Mac.” “When McDonald’s gave the news one beautiful morn, ev’ry hamburger fan had a thrill,” Axton crooned, as a mountain-size Big Mac came into view. “Said a new kind of hamburger’s about to be born--now will it be a boy or a grill?”

Such ads did their job. And as sales mounted, McDonald’s was quick to turn those numbers into larger-than-life visual images--a gimmick still in use. According to McDonald’s, for example, if you took all the Big Macs ever sold and stacked them on top of each other, they would stretch to the moon and back two times, circle the Earth 35.5 times or span 589 lengths of the Great Wall of China.

But the two ad campaigns that would forever cement the Big Mac in the American psyche came in the late 1970s. One grew out of McDonald’s belief that Big Mac commercials should talk about what the sandwich was made of--an idea that, on its face, seemed a sure-fire recipe for boredom. Then, two ad-men tried turning the seven ingredients into a single word.

The result, the “twoallbeefpatties - specialsaucelettucecheesepicklesonions - onasesameseedbun” campaign, featured real customers attempting to recite the tongue-twister. The rapid-fire jingle, which was soon being repeated on schoolyards across the nation, did more than sell burgers. It became part of the landscape, what one scholar calls folk art.

Then came the “Big Mac Attack,” a campaign beginning in 1977 that warned of a super-powered craving that could strike anyone at any time.

As the Big Mac began to travel the world, these images became ever-more pervasive. So did the restaurants, where McDonald’s enforced its credo--Quality, Service, Cleanliness--with militaristic zeal. There was a prescribed procedure for everything, from cleaning restrooms to frying potatoes--and there was only one right way to build a Big Mac. (“There’s a whole procedure,” said one owner-operator. “It’s not just done haphazard.”)

In part because of that consistency, which ensured that the Big Macs chewed the same from Manila to Moscow, the sandwich soon became synonymous with the U.S. of A. “There’s a huge McDonald’s in Prague,” said Secunda, the marketing professor. “People come there to . . . experience the American dream. They come in and have a Big Mac and fries. There is a sense of, ‘This is what America is about.’ ”

But how does the Big Mac taste? Gold, the Times columnist, gives it high marks for crispness but laments its “numbingly sweet sauce”--a gloppy potion that Mimi Sheraton once described as “an oily, sweet-sour emulsion (that) should be thrown . . . down the toilet.” Julia Child once scoffed that the Big Mac is “all bread,” while Richard McDonald, the McDonald’s co-founder, says it’s just too big.

“I have a hard time really getting my mouth around one,” he said in a phone interview from his New Hampshire home. “You can’t knock success. It’s a tremendous item. But for my taste, there’s a lot of stuff on it.”

Junk food junkie Todd Wilbur spent hours analyzing the Big Mac for his book, “Top Secret Recipes: Creating Kitchen Clones of America’s Favorite Brand-Name Foods.” He warns of at least one post-meal side effect.

“You feel like you’ve swallowed a Styrofoam cup,” he said. “I eat them all the time, and when I’ve had my fill I give the extras to my dog. She gets Styrofoam cup syndrome, too--she lays over in the corner for three hours.”

Still, many confess to loving the Big Mac. Gael Greene, New York magazine’s food critic, told Time magazine: “When I want meat, I want a steak. But when I want a hamburger, I want a Big Mac. . . . It’s an incredibly decadent eating experience.” And Michael Stern, who collaborated with his wife, Jane, on “The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste” and several other books, admits that he is not immune to Big Mac attacks.

“Occasionally, maybe once every other year, I do crave a Big Mac,” said Stern, who compares the feeling to the hankering he sometimes gets for really greasy doughnuts. A Big Mac, he said, “really satisfies that primeval need.”

Many people believe, however, that more than its decadence or its power to satisfy, the Big Mac’s strongest selling point is its sameness. For better or worse, as a country “we’re much more comfortable with an unremarkable but dependable meal than with the possibility of a disappointment or a delight,” said Tennyson, the burger maven.

The Big Mac is reliable to the core--a deluxe package whose complex construction makes us feel adventurous, even when we’re treading on familiar ground. For that reason more than any other, what began as a mere burger now represents uniformity in an otherwise chaotic world.

“They punch out a perfect replica every single time. That is something, “ said Marion Cunningham, the author of the Fannie Farmer cookbooks. “There’s that old saying: The only thing you can count on is death and taxes. But I’d say death, taxes and the Big Mac.”

Junk Food Giant: The 25-Year-Old Big Mac--Love It or Loathe It--Has Become an American Icon

Big Mac, Top to Bottom The crown (top bun) Meat patty Pickles Lettuce Onions Special sauce The club (middle bun) Meat patty Cheese Lettuce Onions Special sauce The heel (bottom bun) *

The Not-So-Secret Sauce Water Soybean oil Pickles Vinegar Sugar Modified starch Egg yolk High-fructose corn syrup Mustard flour Salt Xanthan gum Potassium sorbate Extractives of onion/paprika Spice extractives Garlic Hydrolyzed vegetable protein *

Yardstick Height: 3.5 inches Weight: 8.75 ounces Calories: 500 Protein: 25 grams Carbohydrates: 42 grams Added Sugar: 5 grams Fat: 26 grams Cholesterol: 100 mg. Sodium: 890 mg. Iron: 20% of U.S. RDA Calcium: 25% of U.S. RDA Average sesame seeds per Big Mac: 178 Big Macs sold since 1968: more than 14 billion *

Critics Weigh In Julia Child: “It’s all bread.” Gael Greene: “It’s an incredibly decadent eating experience.” Jonathan Gold: “You have that sodium headache after eating it.” Michael Stern: “It’s like diving into a swimming pool filled with chocolate. At first it’s sort of wonderful, but suddenly you realize you’re drowning in it.” *

The Burger Boys

The Big Mac is a knockoff of a double-decker burger invented in Glendale, the Bob’s Big Boy. Here are some other burgers that the Big Boy begat: Burger Boy Country Boy Big Beck Johnie’s Fat Boy Sources: Center for Sciences in the Public interest’s “Fast-Food Guide,” McDonald’s Media Relations, Jeffrey Tennyson’s “Hamburger Heaven: The Illustrated History of the Hamburger” and Todd Wilbur’s “Top Secret Recipes: Creating Kitchen Clones of America’s Favorite Brand-Name Foods”