More on Maccy D’s
September 23rd, 2004Actually, one more thing….the site I linked to in my last post makes heavy promotion of McDonald’s “fruit bags”, as citation to their healthy aims. These contain just 80g of fruit for 59 pence, which is ludicrously high given that a whole apple or orange costs around 20p. Furthermore, why go to all the bother of slicing them and wrapping them up in plastic - what’s wrong with serving a whole fruit?
Possibly because if they priced whole fruit at the same rate then they couldn’t get away with such a high mark-up as the straight comparison would be more noticeable. But a more sinister hypothesis entered my head, after remembering a point Jonathan Meades made - namely that with virtually all fast food (and not just McDonald’s) is served with an entirely different shape, texture and appearance to the original product (like sausages and fish fingers, as well as the ubiquitous burger).
This disguising is often just to mask the fact that such horrible ingredients are being used, but it isn’t just that. By heavily processing and reshaping food, it divorces the end product from its natural origins, leaving no trace of what it used to be. As a result, consumers’ perception of food become one of a finished factory product and the whole concept of ingredients is lost. The very preparation of fresh ingredients becomes a lost art, and people become dependent on fast food. The dicing and repackaging of fruit into little bags like sweets and crisps is a part of that process, an attempt to destroy the natural qualities of the fruit, severing the link between the real food and the end product.
This is only a hypothesis, mind, and it’s entirely possible that the entirely pointless re-packaging of McDonald’s fruit is for some simple economic reason, but I’ve yet to hear it.
September 23rd, 2004 at 17:21:39
Your criticism of the pointless packaging of fruit is valid. It’s not only a waste of packaging but you rightly point out the connection with the urban desire for “clean” and anonymous food lumps. But we can’t let a film as lazy as Super Size Me get away so easily.
So if you eat McDonalds three times a day for a month you get fat and sick. You don’t say. Some things are so obvious they can be left unsaid. And they certainly shouldn’t be made into “campaigning” films. If you eat at McDonalds for every meal and don’t think it will have negative effects then you are truly stupid (as well as quite boring and with a strange taste in food).
But then, if you eat every meal at an expensive French restaurant you will also very rapidly become the owner of an impressive girth. Just ask Nicholas Soames.
September 25th, 2004 at 10:55:34
Martin has missed the point. ‘Super Size Me’ doesn’t assume that most people eat three times a day at McBastard’s. The director/star’s excess is like all caricatures - exaggerating a basic fact to make it more plain and obvious. Which is, in this case, that our junk food diets are killing us, whether we binge once a week or three times a day. No wonder McBastard’s hates the film!