BRACE yourself for a shock. You are about to read the most controversial sentence of the year. Indeed, I doubt whether I will get as far as typing the full-stop before I am hurled to the ground and gagged by a snatch-squad of eco-warriors, vegans and
Guardian columnists. But here goes. The awful truth is, I feel sorry for McDonald’s.
Ouch! Get off my face right now, Polly Toynbee, and let me explain.
In the entire sizzling history of the hamburger, no date is more significant than April 15, 1955. Yes, it was 50 years ago this week, in a small town in Illinois, that a man called Ray Kroc opened the restaurant that changed Western civilisation. Its road-sign was two golden arches. It sold the fastest fast-food known to Fifties Man. And its name was not Kroc’s, but McDonald’s. Why? Because Kroc, a salesman who had sunk his last dime in a milkshake machine, had persuaded two hamburger-cooking brothers called McDonald to let him in on the saucy secrets of their succulent buns.
Genius comes in two sorts. One makes connections that elude others because they are so complex. The other makes connections that elude others because they are so simple. Kroc was of the latter variety. He was an ordinary guy. He had an ordinary ambition. He would cook burgers for other ordinary guys. But to that task he applied extraordinary energy. He would make burgers quicker, cheaper, more efficiently than anyone else on earth. His outlets would gleam brighter. His staff would work harder. His shakes would be sweeter, fries saltier, relishes tangier, colas fizzier, grins broader.
And, basically, that was it. The secret formula for a global empire. A formula which, within 30 years, would attract 150 million customers a day.
In a more trusting age this achievement would elicit admiration. After all, McDonald’s feeds families who can’t afford to eat out anywhere else. It provides jobs for kids who can’t get work anywhere else. And yes, it has made super-size profits, but at least some of those riches have been ploughed back into the welfare of ordinary people. When Kroc’s widow died last year she left no less than $1.5 billion to the Salvation Army.
Yet in the eyes of McDonald’s vast army of enemies, none of this adds up to a hill of gherkins. Why? Because the ubiquitous golden M has come to symbolise something far more sinister than a burger chain. To liberal Europe it stands for American cultural imperialism at its most coercive. To anti-capitalists it epitomises the frightful power of the multinationals. To trade-unionists it represents autocratic managers riding roughshod over cowed workers. To environmentalists it means the wanton destruction of natural resources and reckless production of more and more garbage.
To animal-welfare campaigners it signifies all that is vilest about slaughterhouse farming. And to nutritionists, their prescriptive tendencies encouraged by the current media panic about obesity, it offers an irresistible target for wrath and heavy-handed satires such as Super Size Me.
The result? McDonald’s has become our favourite corporate scapegoat. Yes, the company will get a lot of publicity in the run-up to its 50th anniversary. But not for celebratory reasons. What will capture the headlines is the release of McLibel — a shamelessly partisan, if entertaining, film that chronicles the stupendous 314-day libel proceedings (the longest court case in English history) that McDonald’s brought against two British environmental campaigners who dared to suggest that not all of its methods were of angelic perfection. The film, to be shown on BBC Four on Wednesday, follows the battle to its climax two months ago, when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the campaigners had been prevented by the legal system from arguing their case on a level playing-field.
So McDonald’s is again painted as a brute monster hellbent on global domination but given a satisfying bloody nose by two plucky individuals. “Who said ordinary people can’t change the world?” McLibel’s director, Franny Armstrong, asks rhetorically — referring to the two heroes.
The irony, of course, is that McDonald’s itself was created by ordinary people who changed the world. Now, though, the world has changed again. The food vigilantes have taken charge. And try as McDonald’s might — with its desperate Damascene conversion to salads, yoghurts, herbal teas and low-carb sandwiches — it can’t appease its enemies at this 11th hour. Its fate is fixed. It’s the big bad wolf that must be slain before it destroys our children ’s health. And to hell with consumer choice.
Well, so be it. But if we really wanted to stop teenagers getting fat, we would make them walk to school, wean them off watching four hours of telly a night, and stop selling off playing-fields. To do that, however, would require an unprecedented display of parental willpower from the public and courage from politicians. Far easier to blame our social ills on a burger chain, just because it’s naff, American, and very slick at what it does.
Science shunned
TRITE, gimmicky, degrading — those were adjectives that came to mind when I heard about FameLab. It’s a talent show to find the “new face of science”: the “Einstein meets Jamie Oliver” figure who will galvanise the nation’s enthusiasm for quarks or string theory. In the heat stage, each egghead is given just 180 seconds to impress the judges with a deft line in scientific patter. A Channel 4 slot awaits the winner.
Yes, it does sound ghastly. Yet something must be done about science. A third of all university physics faculties have been axed since 1990. Five chemistry faculties have closed in a year. Popular science programmes are all but banished from TV. And the Science Museum is in crisis. Science has never been so big a force in our lives. Yet it has never been so little discussed by the public.
Twas not ever thus. This week, Sotheby’s auctions the library of the 18th-century Earls of Macclesfield: a trove of 20,000 classic scientific tomes that bear witness to an age when even English aristocrats thirsted after the latest research.
How can we rekindle that curiosity? FameLab may be yet another triumph of piffle over substance. But if it unearths the charismatic figure who can make science accessible, especially for youngsters, all may be forgiven. Otherwise, the nation of Faraday and Darwin will soon know as little of molecules as the average medieval peasant.
Brushed aside
IF YOU cheat at cards you are thrown out of the game. Get red-carded in football and you will be banned from the next match. Yet after being caught vote-rigging, the Labour Party sails into the election without any punishment or the slightest show of contrition. “The wards affected were two out of 6,000 contested,” Blair trills blithely. Robert Mugabe must be filled with admiration for such adroit handling of the democratic process.
Nothing to Haydn
HATS off to the Canton Symphony Orchestra in Ohio. And indeed knickers off as well. To dispel classical music’s “stuffy” image, its female players have shed their inhibitions and much else for a fund-raising calendar. One lady has only a pair of cymbals to preserve her modesty.
That’s just silly. Surely a triangle is much better shaped for the task.
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