Why do people think that certain companies and individuals can be
ruthlessly attacked at every turn?

Is there only one capitalist company in the world today that sells food?
McDonald's is constantly attacked for everything they do as if they were
deliberately trying to destroy the planet, pauper their employees and
poison their customers.

It cannot simply be tall poppy syndrome, that any successful company
will attract people willing to attack it shamelessly at every
opportunity and for every single decision it makes. People don't do the
same thing with Sony, Disney and Ford. There must be at least one other
element in the mix. I can see several:

• Meat
• America
• Class

McDonald's is public enemy number one for many vegetarians because it
sells meat, successfully, in huge quantities. Many vegetarians bitterly
resent the fact that any meat tastes good and people enjoy eating it.
Now that they have decided not to eat meat for whatever reason (often
nothing to do with the reasons they tell themselves or others) they want
to stop anybody else eating meat, or failing that to stop anybody from
enjoying eating meat. McDonald's represents the devil to these
vegetarians. McDonald's makes eating meat easy, cheap and delicious.
McDonald's makes eating meat guilt-free as there are no animals or bones
on view. This incenses vegetarians, how can they fight against such an
adversary? Easy, attack everything they do, everywhere, at all times, at
every opportunity: the packaging is misleading, the lighting is too
bright, the colour scheme is garish, the uniforms are demeaning, only
jerks work there, there's no ingredients list in braille on the
packaging. Why is there any packaging at all? There's too much salt on
the fries. Why don't they let you put your own salt on? There's too much
packaging, why don't they put the sugar in your coffee for you? The
coffee is too hot, there should be a warning. Stupid bloody warning, who
doesn't know that it's hot? They don't really care, they only do that
not to get sued. They only make it that hot to make more money, the
*******s. How much? Is there anybody serving here?
Other people hate McDonald's because it represents some amorphous
ill-defined threat of globalization, capitalism or American cultural
imperialism. What? McDonald's should not be McDonald's because they
don't like the ideas they think it represents, it should just not be
McDonald's, don't do it. Why? Why would McDonald's decide not to operate
in the way it knows how in places that it could make money? Just to make
some people who don't like capitalism or America feel better in some
ill-defined way? There's a hell of a lot of people who think
anti-capitalists should just not do it either.


McDonald's is where poor people eat. By disdaining McDonald's they put
themselves clearly in a superior social position. Similar reasoning
accounts for the vitriol heaped upon Wal*Mart. It is amazing how a place
so many people wouldn't be seen dead in is the focus of so much concern.

To make everybody happy McDonald's should:

Make more profit

Charge less

Make meat more expensive

Stop selling meat

Attract a better class of customer

Go out of business

Sell only Organic Vegan food

Become a workers' co-operative

Take action over obesity

Serve bigger burgers

Serve better quality meat

Offer better value

Show concern for the environment

Offer a simple menu, the same everywhere

Stop pretending to care about the environment and obesity

Serve coffee modestly hot that stays at that temperature for an hour, in
a simpler spill-proof cup. With free refills.

Offer more choice of food

Waste less food

Serve local food

Cook everything fresh to order

Serve people faster

Serve food in packaging that finds its own way to the recycling centre

Fry only in low fat Organic Vegan water

Stop pandering to the fads of people who don't even eat there

Serve food freshly cooked that isn't too hot or reheated or kept warm or
wasted

Come on. Get real for a few moments here. McDonald's sells food that can
be eaten with one hand, no teeth and your eyes on the road. Everything
that isn't wrapper needs to be edible, and everything needs a wrapper to
keep it warm until it gets home or to stop flavours contaminating each
other. People want the food cheap and delicious and they associate
getting meat in it with offering value. McDonald's gives them meat, pure
beef without offal, rusk, fillers, binders, water-retaining bulking
agents and mechanically recovered chicken, which you cannot say for the
burgers that are sold out of dirty vans by ill-trained vendors in Britain.

McDonald's makes burgers out of pure beef. Of course it doesn't use the
best cuts of the most expensive carcases, the stuff is chopped and
shaped and served with onion, ketchup, mustard and a slice of dill
flavoured pickled gherkin, it doesn't have to have a lot of the finest
beef flavours to make a satisfying sandwich. And what kind of an expert
chef needs to use the most expensive ingredients in order to make
something worth eating? Taking only the finest and freshest ingredients
to make something to eat isn't great cooking, it's great shopping.
Making something delicious with the finest cuts of meat and the freshest
vegetables and herbs is not a challenge. Making profits selling a
cheeseburger for half the price of a cheese sandwich on white bread from
a supermarket, that is catering. Respect.

If you want a better tasting burger order a quarter pounder, which is
made of better quality beef and has proper onion on it and served on a
more substantial bun. What it doesn't have on it is stuff that sounds
like a good idea but doesn't contribute to the experience of eating a
burger that has been waiting for you to buy it. Lettuce and tomato might
seem like a good idea if you are cooking fresh for each order but that
isn't the McDonald's way. Even when I cook burgers for myself fresh I
find that salad falls out and cool salad and hot burger rapidly turn
into something unappetizingly luke warm with congealing grease.

Food snobs think burgers are disgusting because “you don't know what's
in them” but they wax lyrical about all kinds of offal, whitebait (have
you ever met a whitebait-filleter?), pté, traditional pies and pasties,
witchetty grubs, snails and even faggots (don't even go there). If you
can eat a filter-feeding bivalve bottom-dweller alive and crunch the
head of a shrimp that has spent its life treading water by the sewage
outflow pipe why is the thought of what might be in a 100% pure beef
patty something to keep you awake at night? The sweetest meat is nearest
the bone but mechanically recovered meat is anathema. They will crunch
through the ribcage of some small gamebird (lead shot and all), make
stock from stuff your cat would shun and strip a poussin clean but worry
what goes into a McNugget because “you can't tell what you're eating”.

If you want mysterious cheap cuts of meats and offals you really
wouldn't want to eat on their own order a haggis, don't bother with
McDonald's. I wonder, in two hundred years will people look back on the
Big Mac and the Turkey Twizzler with the dewy-eyed nostalgia they now
look on the haggis, the stargazy pie, the pastie and the faggot?
Traditional working class food: wholesome and hearty.

It seems the food snobs will eat anything as long as the oiks seem to be
giving it a miss these days. Jamie Oliver will curl his lip with the
disgust at the “donkey ********” that go into Turkey Twizzlers but will
go misty-eyed at the idea of traditional Italian sausages with raw
donkey meat or eating testicles as a delicacy. British working class
people eating donkey ******** is bad, foreign peasants eating the offals
of ethnic beasts of burden is good.

In the time I have been eating McDonald's I have seen the menu improve,
the value improve, the packaging become more biodegradable and
recyclable. You can get salads and orange juice and milk and fruit. All
the eggs are free range. McDonald's sell cheap meat-based fast food and
they do it well. They don't claim to offer everything you need for a
well-balanced diet so that you can live off the stuff and never eat
anything else any more than a fish and chip shop does. Give them a break.

If you don't want to eat at McDonald's feel free not to. Listening to
anti-capitalist Vegan snobs tell me how terrible McDonald's is and how
they should change is like listening to the Pope describing sex
positions or Osama Bin Ladin's recipes for cocktails.

If nothing else just think, if it wasn't for McDonalds you'd have to use
regular public toilets.
--

Martin Willett


http://mwillett.org/