Actually, 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.
