What’s wrong with MacDonald’s (from the leaflet of London Greenpiece)
PET FOOD & LITTER
McDonald's and Burger King are two of the many US corporations using lethal poisons to destroy vast areas of Central American rainforest to create grazing pastures for cattle to be sent back to the States as burgers and pet food, and to provide fat-food packaging materials. (Don't be fooled by McDonald's saying they use recycled paper: only a tiny per cent of it is. The truth is it takes 800 square miles of forest just to keep them supplied with paper for one year. Tons of this end up litteing the cities of 'developed' countries.)
GROSS MISUSE OF RESOURCES
GRAIN is fed to cattle in South American countries to produce the meat in McDonald's hamburgers. Cattle consume 10 times the amount of grain and soy that humans do: one calorie of beef demands ten calories of grain. The waste would feed, clothe and house the world's entire population fo one year.
HUNGRY FOR DOLLARS
McDonald's is one of several giant corporations with investments in poor countries, sold to them by the dollar-hungry rulers (often military) and privileged elites. The power of the US dollar means that in order to buy technology and manufactured goods, poor countries HAVE TO produce more and more food for export to the States. Out of 40 of the world's poorest countries, 36 export food to the USA – the wealthiest.
ECONOMIC IMPERIALISM
Some 'Third World' countries, where most children do not enough, are exporting their crops as animal feed — i.e. to fatten cattle for turning into burgers in the 'First World'. Millions of acres of the best farmland in poor contries are being used for our benefit — for tea, coffee, tobacco, etc. — while people there are starving. McDonald's is involved in this economic imperialism, which keeps most black people poor and hungry while many whites grow fat.
COLONIAL INVASION
Not only are McDonald's and many other corporations are forcing the tribal peoples in the rainforests off their ancestral territories where they have lived peacefully, without damaging their envronment, for thousands of years. This is a typical example of the arrogance of multinational companies in their endless search for more and more profit. So when you bite into a Big Mac, you're helping the McDonald's empire to wreck this planet.
UNHEALTHY FOOD
McDONALD's try to show in their «Nutrition Guide» (which is full of impressive-looking but really quite irrelevant facts & figures) that mass-produced hamburgers, chips, colas, milkshakes, etc., are a useful and nutritious part of any diet.
But the diet high in fat, sugar, animal products and salt (sodium), and low in fibre, vitamins and minerals is linked with cancers of the breast and bowel, and heart disease. This is accepted medical fact.
FAST = JUNK
Even if they like eating them, most people recognise that processed burgers and synthetic chips, served up in paper and plastic containers, is junk-food. McDonald's prefer the name «fast-food». It's sign of the junk-quality of Big Macs that people actually hold competitions to see who can eat one in the shortest time.
PAYING FOR THE HABIT
Chewing is essential for good health, as it promotes the flow of digestive juices which break down the food and send nutrients into the blood. McDonald's food is so lacking in bulk it is hardly possible to chew it. Even their own figures show thata «quarter-pounder» is 48% water. This sort of fake food encourages over-eating, and the high sugar and sodium content can make people develop a kind of addiction — a 'craving'. That means more profit for McDonald's, but constipation, clogged arteries andheart attacks for many customers.
THE NORMALITY TRAP
Advertisements portraying McDonald's as a happy, circus-like place where burgers and chips are for everybody at any hour of the day (and late at night), traps children into thinking they aren't 'normal' if they don't go there too. McDonald's know exactly what kind of pressure this puts on people looking after children.
In what way are McDonald's responsible for torture and murder?
THE menu at McDonald's is based on meat. They sell millions of burgers every day in 35 countries throughout the world. This means the constant slaughter, day by day, of animals born and bred solely to be turned into McDonald's products.Some of them — especially chickens and pigs — spend their lives in the entirely artificial conditions of huge factory farms, with no access to air or sunshine and no freedom of movement. Their deaths are bloody and barbaric.
What's it like WORKING FOR McDonald's?
THERE must be a serious problem: even though 80% of McDonald's workers are part-time, the annual staff turnover is 60% (in the USA it's 300 %). It's not unusual for their restaurant-workers to quit after just four or five weeks. The reasons are not had to find.
NO UNIONS ALLOWED
Workers in catering are at work in the evenings and at weekends, doing long shifts in hot, smelly, noisy environments. Wages are low and chances of promotion minimal. To improve this through Trade Union negotiation is very difficult: there is no union specifically for these workers, and the ones they could join show little interest in the problems of part-timers (mostly women). A recent survey of workers in burger-resturants found that 80% said they needed union help over pay and conditions. Another difficulty is that the 'kitchen trade' has a high proportion of workers from ethnic minority groups who, with little chance of getting work elsewhere, are wary of being saced — as many have been — for attempting union organisation.
McDonald's have a policy of preventing unionisation by getting rid of pro-union workers. So far this has succeeded everywhere in the world except Sweden, and in Dublin after a long struggle.
TRAINED TO SWEAT
It's obvious that all large chain-stores and junk-food giants depend for their fat profits on the labour of young people. McDonald's is no exception: three-quarters of its workers are under 21. The production-line system deskills the work itself: nybody can grill a hamburger, and cleaning toilets or smiling at customers needs no training. So there is no need to employ chefs or qualified staff — just anybody prepared to work for low wages.
As there is no legally-enforced minimum wage in Britain, McDonald's can pay what they like, helping to depress wage levels in the catering trade still further. They say they are providing jobs for school-leavers and take them on regardless of sex or race.The truth is McDonald's are only interested in recruiting cheap labour — which always means that disadvantaged groups, women and black people especially, are even more exploited by industry than they are already.
(WHO MADE THIS LEAFLET?
THE LONDON GREENPEACE GROUP has existed for many years as an independent group of activists with no involvement in any particular political party. The people — not 'members' — who come to the weekly open meetings share a concern for the oppression in our ives and the destruction of our environment. Many opposition movements are growing in strength — ecological, anti-war, animal liberation, and anarchist-libertarian movements — and continually learning from each other. We encourage people to think and act ndependently, without leaders, to try to understand the causes of oppression and to aim for its abolition through social revolution. This begins in our own lives, now.)
