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Ranting 1 | 2 | 3
The Great Teleport Debate
Gandhi: Great Soul or Arsehole?
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 bastards. 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. |
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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?), pâté, 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 bollocks” 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 bollocks 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 McDonald's you'd have to use regular public toilets.