The company you hold says a lot about you. But what about the companies we shop? Does this too reflect upon us? The meals we buy, the shirts we wear, all the way to the tomatoes we eat, have all been engineered to fit into our lives, and many of us could not picture living without. Have multinational corporations like McDonalds sold us hamburgers and a side of “bum deal”? All the while invading popular culture with catchy marketing and infiltrating ideals. Our health, our morals, and our pocket books take a hit every day. And yet, day-by-day, these gigantic corporations spend billions trying to sell us what we didn't know we needed. And now we are hooked. I have a compartment in my car set aside specifically for extra condiments; sauces, plastic silverware, straws; my fast food contraband. My parents didn't live this way. But I do. My child does. We all do, now. This isn't just about food. I'm not just talking about the way we eat or the way we shop. This is about what we are feeding our souls and the future leaders of this world. We have essentially become caged animals being fed by the hand that bites us. Biting into our retirement, spending our savings on Latté's and Happy Meals. I'm McJaded. I'm running toward risks I didn't even know existed. Trouble is, corporations like McDonalds can only exist by selling what is bought by consumers in massive amounts. We have all sat idle in our cars waiting for our uniformly wrapped dinners to be served to us. Folded up in tidy little packages, successfully engineered to taste exactly the same in a Portland drive through, as it does in Duluth. Is it McDonalds who's to blame? Or is this a problem of don't ask don't care? Maybe a bit of both, resulting in a crafty recipe wrought with consumer ambivalence, cardboard happiness, and apathy. Add in high profit margins and moral promiscuity, and one can easily see
we have a monster of unyielding power on our hands. A monster created for the people, by the people, with one agenda; get money.
We live in a culture of big and bigger. A society where mass consumption is celebrated as ritual, and cultural acceptance of this devouring is commonplace. It's no wonder corporations like McDonald's have thrived here. I want to know when it is that too much of a good thing begins to go rancid on our conscious. Is it when countless eye-opening studies bring to light the concrete results of excess, and the resulting toll on our physical selves? Or is it first our emotional self that is awakened to this harsh reality of overindulgence and disregard? The taxing of our health by the fast food and fast paced society we live in has been widely discussed and ridiculed for years. This is nothing new. Smoking for instance, has condemned the health of its prey for decades. But the faithfully addicted remain devout to the reality they choose. And the reality of choice is a slippery slope in deed. My world and yours, has been super sized by a corporation whose unsavory practices of selling crap to busy, hungry people, has jaded some of us, and infuriated others. On which side of the fence you wind up determines I suppose, whether you drive through asking no questions at all, or demand that Ronald has some splaining to do.
There were in fact, two such famous questioners of McDonalds and their insalubrious activities. When Helen Steel and Dave Morris, activists with London Greenpeace, began passing out leaflets titled “What Wrong With McDonalds- Everything they don't want you to know” they turned up the heat on themselves. But when McDonalds decided to sue them for Libel, Ronald unknowingly turned up the heat on himself. Helen and Dave represented themselves in what turned out to be the longest running libel trial in Brittan's history. McDonald's sued them for the four elements in the leaflet that they perceived to be libelous: “exploiting children with advertising, promoting an unhealthy diet, exploiting their staff and being responsible for environmental damage and ill treatment of animals.”(2005). There were over 60 witnesses that testified on behalf of the side of the defendants. One such witness, Howard Lyman, a former agribusiness man, testified to his involvement in the mass slaughtering of animals. “We ended up eliminating the birds killing the trees, turned the soil into something that looked like we had imported it from mars”(1997). Lyman discusses his part in the ranching business that supplies multinationals like McDonalds. He implicates himself in the direct involvement of the deforestation of the rainforest's, which was one of the main arguments that Helen and Dave pioneered to bring public. Cattle ranchers know their part in the process, just as I'm sure, we consumers do. Lyman has since gone vegan. He no longer raises animal to die for the consumption of others. Helen and Dave, years later, won the libel suit. The McThis-and-that of corporations such as McDonalds, characterized by greed and consumer apathy, was challenged by these two regular citizens that refused to back down and sit idly by while mass profits were being made in the name of deceit.
