(The European Court of Human Rights held today that the UK Government was
liable to Steel and Morris, defendants in the McLibel case, for refusing
them legal aid.)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/food/Story...415031,00.html

http://tinyurl.com/5hl2g (full URL:
http://www.echr.coe.int/eng/Press/20...l&MorrisvUnite
dKingdom150205.htm )



"FIFTY ACRES EVERY MINUTE

EVERY year an area of rainforest the size of Britain is cut down or
defoliated, and burnt. Globally, one billion people depend on water flowing
from these forests, which soak up rain and release it gradually. The
disaster in Ethiopia and Sudan is at least partly due to uncontrolled
deforestation. In Amazonia - where there are now about 100,000 beef ranches
- torrential rains sweep down through the treeless valleys, eroding the land
and washing away the soil. The bare earth, baked by the tropical sun,
becomes useless for agriculture. It has been estimated that this destruction
causes at least one species of animal, plant or insect to become extinct
every few hours.

Why is it wrong for McDonald's to destroy rainforests?

AROUND the Equator there is a lush green belt of incredibly beautiful
tropical forest, untouched by human development for one hundred million
years, supporting about half of the Earth's life-forms, including some
30,000 plant species, and producing a major part of the planet's crucial
supply of oxygen.

PET FOOD AND LITTER

McDonald's and Burger King are two of the many US corporations using lethal
poisons to destroy vast areas of Central American rainforest to create
grazing pastures for cattle to be sent back to the States as burgers and pet
food, and to provide fast-food packaging materials. (Don't be fooled by
McDonald's saying they use recycled paper: only a tiny per cent of it is.
The truth is it takes 800 square miles of forest just to keep them supplied
with paper for one year. Tons of this end up littering the cities of
'developed' countries.)

COLONIAL INVASION

Not only are McDonald's and many other corporations contributing to a major
ecological catastrophe, they are forcing the tribal peoples in the
rainforests off their ancestral territories where they have lived
peacefully, without damaging their environment, for thousands of years. This
is a typical example of the arrogance and viciousness of multinational
companies in their endless search for more and more profit.
It's no exaggeration to say that when you bite into a Big Mac, you're
helping McDonald's empire to wreck this planet.

What's so unhealthy about McDonald's food?

McDONALD's try to show in their 'Nutrition Guide' (which is full of
impressive-looking but really quite irrelevant facts & figures) that
mass-produced hamburgers, chips, colas & milkshakes, etc., are a useful and
nutritious part of any diet.
What they don't make clear is that a diet high in fat, sugar, animal
products and salt (sodium), and low in fibre, vitamins and minerals - which
describes an average McDonald's meal - is linked with cancers of the breast
and bowel, and heart disease. This is accepted medical fact, not a cranky
theory. Every year in Britain, heart disease alone causes about 18,000
deaths.

FAST = JUNK

Even if they like eating them, most people recognise that processed burgers
and synthetic chips, served up in paper and plastic containers, is
junk-food. McDonald's prefer the name 'fast-food'. This is not just because
it is manufactured and served up as quickly a possible - it has to be eaten
quickly too. It's a sign of the junk-quality of Big Macs that people
actually hold competitions to see who can eat one in the shortest time.

PAYING FOR THE HABIT

Chewing is essential for good health, as it promotes the flow of digestive
juices which break down the food and send nutrients into the blood.
McDonald's food is so lacking in bulk it is hardly possible to chew it. Even
their own figures show that a 'quarter-pounder' is 48% water. This sort of
fake food encourages over-eating, and the high sugar and sodium content can
make people develop a kind of addiction - a 'craving'. That means more
profit for McDonald's, but constipation, clogged arteries and heart attacks
for many customers.

GETTING THE CHEMISTRY RIGHT

McDONALD's stripy staff uniforms, flashy lighting, bright plastic décor,
'Happy Hats' and muzak, are all part of the gimmicky dressing-up of
low-quality food which has been designed down to the last detail to look and
feel and taste exactly the same in any outlet anywhere in the world. To
achieve this artificial conformity, McDonald's require that their 'fresh
lettuce leaf', for example, is treated with twelve different chemicals just
to keep it the right colour at the right crispness for the right length of
time. It might as well be a bit of plastic.

How do McDonald's deliberately exploit children?

NEARLY all McDonald's advertising is aimed at children. Although the Ronald
McDonald 'personality' is not as popular as their market researchers
expected (probably because it is totally unoriginal), thousands of young
children now think of burgers and chips every time they see a clown with
orange hair.

THE NORMALITY TRAP

No parent needs to be told how difficult it is to distract a child from
insisting on a certain type of food or treat. Advertisements portraying
McDonald's as a happy, circus-like place where burgers and chips are
provided for everybody at any hour of the day (and late at night), traps
children into thinking they aren't 'normal' if they don't go there too.
Appetite, necessity and - above all - money, never enter into the 'innocent'
world of Ronald McDonald.
Few children are slow to spot the gaudy red and yellow standardised
frontages in shopping centres and high streets throughout the country.
McDonald's know exactly what kind of pressure this puts on people looking
after children. It's hard not to give in to this 'convenient' way of keeping
children 'happy', even if you haven't got much money and you try to avoid
junk-food.

TOY FOOD

As if to compensate for the inadequacy of their products, McDonald's promote
the consumption of meals as a 'fun event'. This turns the act of eating into
a performance, with the 'glamour' of being in a McDonald's ('Just like it is
in the ads!) reducing the food itself to the status of a prop.

Not a lot of children are interested in nutrition, and even if they were,
all the gimmicks and routines with paper hats and straws and balloons hide
the fact that the food they're seduced into eating is at best mediocre, at
worst poisonous - and their parents know it's not even cheap.

RONALD'S DIRTY SECRET

ONCE told the grim story about how hamburgers are made, children are far
less ready to join in Ronald McDonald's perverse antics. With the right
prompting, a child's imagination can easily turn a clown into a bogeyman (a
lot of children are very suspicious of clowns anyway). Children love a
secret, and Ronald's is especially disgusting.

In what way are McDonald's responsible for torture and murder?

THE menu at McDonald's is based on meat. They sell millions of burgers every
day in 35 countries throughout the world. This means the constant slaughter,
day by day, of animals born and bred solely to be turned into McDonald's
products.
Some of them - especially chickens and pigs - spend their lives in the
entirely artificial conditions of huge factory farms, with no access to air
or sunshine and no freedom of movement. Their deaths are bloody and
barbaric.

MURDERING A BIG MAC

In the slaughterhouse, animals often struggle to escape. Cattle become
frantic as they watch the animal before them in the killing-line being
prodded, beaten, electrocuted and knifed.
A recent British government report criticised inefficient stunning
methods which frequently result in animals having their throats cut while
still fully conscious. McDonald's are responsible for the deaths of
countless animals by this supposedly humane method.
We have the choice to eat meat or not. The 450 million animals killed
for food in Britain every year have no choice at all. It is often said that
after visiting an abattoir, people become nauseous at the thought of eating
flesh. How many of us would be prepared to work in a slaughterhouse and kill
the animals we eat?

WHAT'S YOUR POISON?

MEAT is responsible for 70% of all food-poisoning incidents, with chicken
and minced meat (as used in burgers) being the worst offenders. When animals
are slaughtered, meat can be contaminated with gut contents, faeces and
urine, leading to bacterial infection. In an attempt to counteract infection
in their animals, farmers routinely inject them with doses of antibiotics.
These, in addition to growth-promoting hormone drugs and pesticide residues
in their feed, build up in the animals' tissues and can further damage the
health of people on a meat-based diet.

What's it like working for McDonald's?

THERE must be a serious problem: even though 80% of McDonald's workers are
part-time, the annual staff turnover is 60% (in the USA it's 300%). It's not
unusual for their restaurant-workers to quit after just four or five weeks.
The reasons are not hard to find.

NO UNIONS ALLOWED

Workers in catering do badly in terms of pay and conditions. They are at
work in the evenings and at weekends, doing long shifts in hot, smelly,
noisy environments. Wages are low and chances of promotion minimal.
To improve this through Trade Union negotiation is very difficult:
there is no union specifically for these workers, and the ones they could
join show little interest in the problems of part-timers (mostly women). A
recent survey of workers in burger-restaurants found that 80% said they
needed union help over pay and conditions. Another difficulty is that the
'kitchen trade' has a high proportion of workers from ethnic minority groups
who, with little chance of getting work elsewhere, are wary of being sacked
- as many have been - for attempting union organisation.
McDonald's have a policy of preventing unionisation by getting rid of
pro-union workers. So far this has succeeded everywhere in the world except
Sweden, and in Dublin after a long struggle.

TRAINED TO SWEAT

It's obvious that all large chain-stores and junk-food giants depend for
their fat profits on the labour of young people. McDonald's is no exception:
three-quarters of its workers are under 21. The production-line system
deskills the work itself: anybody can grill a hamburger, and cleaning
toilets or smiling at customers needs no training. So there is no need to
employ chefs or qualified staff - just anybody prepared to work for low
wages.
As there is no legally-enforced minimum wage in Britain, McDonald's can
pay what they like, helping to depress wage levels in the catering trade
still further. They say they are providing jobs for school-leavers and take
them on regardless of sex or race. The truth is McDonald's are only
interested in recruiting cheap labour - which always means that
disadvantaged groups, women and black people especially, are even more
exploited by industry than they are already."