ANOTHER McDonald’s restaurant opened yesterday in Chicago. Nothing remarkable, you might think, for a company that now franchises more than 30,000 outlets around the world.

But the celebrations at the 600 North Clark Street site were special. For yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of the opening of the first McDonald’s, down the highway in Des Plaines, Illinois.

A few years back the golden anniversary of the Golden Arches might have been a moment for unalloyed national celebration, too.

But in 50 years, the McDonald’s Corporation has travelled from pioneer of a new and uniquely American eating experience, to icon of the global appeal of American capitalism, to perhaps one of the most despised corporate symbols in the history of private enterprise.

Though the great skyline-dominating signs still point out that more than 80 billion meals have been served, and while tens of millions of people still line up each day for their Big Macs and McNuggets, the company has become the target of opprobrium the world over. For its enemies, in the last decade Mackey D’s has become the very symbol of all that they hate about modern capitalism.

In the language of the anti-globalisation movement the Mc-prefix has become synonymous for anything mass-produced, and generally unwholesome, a catch-all term that encompasses environment- destroying, worker-exploiting, animal-abusing, and of course, child-fattening, obesity-promoting capitalist overreach.

The company’s success has spawned an entire industry of anti-McDonald’s protesters, and has created a new class of anti-hero — the McDonald’s Martyr, men and women who have taken on the company in the courts, through direct political action and, perhaps most of all, in popular culture.

It all seems such a long way from that moment in April 1955 when Ray Kroc, a 52-year-old businessman constantly on the lookout for new marketing ideas, welcomed the first happy customers to his restaurant in Des Plaines.

It was not technically, the first McDonald’s. In a journey now enshrined in corporate legend, Kroc had travelled a few years earlier to California, touting his newest product, the Multimixer, a milk-shake machine that could produce eight drinks at a time.

In San Bernardino he discovered a remarkable pair of brothers, Dick and Mac McDonald, who had perfected a limited menu hamburger stand that enabled them to turn out high-quality fast food at low prices. Kroc immediately saw the potential and persuaded the brothers to take the idea nationwide.

The Golden Arches became one of the most recognised symbols of the American landscape. Children were an early target of the Kroc marketing genius. In 1963, the Ronald McDonald clown character was born. According to America Eats Out, a history of fast food by John Mariani, “within six years of airing his first national television advertisement in 1965, the Ronald McDonald clown character was familiar to 96 per cent of American children” — far more than could recognise the US President.

As the US market became saturated, McDonald’s looked overseas. The first British restaurant opened in 1974 and this success story continued around the globe. The high point of the company’s fortunes was probably the opening, to great fanfare, of the first McDonald’s in Moscow in January 1990, when thousands of Muscovites queued for hours in Pushkin Square for their first real taste of American-delivered freedom.

But McDonald’s ambitions began to run into opposition.

Initially, it was environmental protesters who objected to the cartons the company used for its burgers, which they claimed were destroying the ozone layer. That first, ultimately successful protest, opened the floodgates for anti-McDonald’s sentiment.

In the 1990s, as American-led globalisation accelerated, McDonald’s appeared to many the incarnation of everything they disliked about global capitalism.

Cheap food produced by unskilled workers on low wages was a ripe target (though the protesters never stopped to think that the alternative to low-wage jobs in much of Europe was not high-wage jobs, but no-wage jobs). The company’s sometimes overzealous attempts to defend itself only sharpened its reputation as a corporate rottweiler. In Britain, it launched a libel case against Helen Steel and Dave Morris, who had published material claiming the company abused animals and exploited workers.

But the biggest challenge came at home in the US as the company came under increasing attack for its aggressive promotion of high-fat junk food, especially to children. Litigious complainants launched a host of lawsuits, claiming McDonald’s was killing them, though few were successful.

Last year, a surprise hit movie was Super Size Me, a documentary by Morgan Spurlock, an independent film-maker who had the bright idea of eating nothing but McDonald’s food for a month and seeing what damage it did.

McDonald’s has become so defensive about the criticism that if you listened only to what the company now says about itself you would think it was actually some sort of whole food fitness-promoting non-profit charity for vegetarians.

In the past year its major marketing initiatives have included: the promotion of new salad options that augment its fat-heavy menu; Go Active!, a campaign to encourage customers to be get fit; and most recently, a programme with the vaguely Soviet-sounding title, Worldwide Balanced, Active Lifestyles Public Awareness Campaign.

And yet, for all the protests, and for all the company’s attempts to recast itself in the public eye, the evidence is that the world still seems to love those hamburgers.

SUPERSIZE ME

• McDonald’s has more than 31,000 restaurants in 119 countries
  
• The first McDonald’s was opened by Dick and Mac McDonald in 1948. 2005 is the anniversary of the first franchise opened by Ray Kroc in 1955
  
• McDonald’s opened its 100th restaurant in 1959, its 1,000th in 1968 and its 25,000th in 1999.
  

• The first British branch opened in 1974 in Woolwich, South London

• There are now 1,200 branches in Britain

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