So I saw this article over on the Montreal Gazette. I have no idea how I got there, but it seems to me I’ve linked a few of their stories lately, which seems odd and is probably the work of a rescued llama that was given opposable thumbs and mutant powers and what was I just talking about? Oh, the article.
Chicken Nuggets, as made by McDonald’s, are apparently made out of chicken. There are various stories going around, including the strawberry milkshake picture, and I guess something about them being 56% corn somehow, and also that they contain Silly Putty, and other levels of ludicrosity. Anyway, some guy from The Office of Science and Society, and I’m gonna trust him because that sounds like a cool gig, this guy says it’s pretty much just breaded chicken.
And you know what? I’m cool with that even if the guy turns out to be a one man think tank for fast food. Not the chicken part, obviously, but I really don’t need to be scaremongering when it comes to talking about what’s wrong with nuggets. Here’s the thing: you start trying to tell people about the horrible stuff that’s in something that’s been around as long as nuggets, and it’s not like cigarettes – people are going to think hey, I’ve eaten them all my life and I’m not dead, so maybe the scary stuff isn’t so scary, and maybe there’s even more processed animal food out there that I should embrace. It kinda helps that the things are somewhat tasty, or at least I’d assume so since people keep eating them.
But if everything tastes like chicken, why do we need chicken? There’s a store 4 minutes away from my office that sells a vegan version of the chicken nugget that as far as I can tell is bang-on accurate. Oh, and in between my office and that store is a store that sells booze, so yeah, I’m pretty much the mayor of awesometown. Anyway, there’s really no need, as far as I can tell, for chicken nuggets to exist other than to serve as a waste product disposal technique turned profit centre for the poultry industry.
You want to know what’s scary inside chicken nuggets? Ground up birds, that’s what. Not much else you need to know, really, so instead of getting a degree in chemistry and still getting the components wrong, how’s about we work on changing that urban legend about KFC changing their name to just initials because they don’t sell actual chicken anymore into a delightful plant-based reality?
Oh, and because I said I was going to focus on stuff people submit, here’s a video Amanda sent in that fits the theme. The ramble up above was just something I made up to pad out the post. Er, if you’re prone to seizures, well, you probably already know not to click on random video links, right?
McRib, McShrib. Come to think of it, lots of foods would become limited edition if more people went vegan.
Gosh, the internet sure likes lists, don’t they? I’m still waiting for “8 letters that come before I in the alphabet” but in the meantime we get things like 9 Limited-Edition Foods with Cult Followings. Interestingly, that list was taken from a Woman’s Day article listing 10 items, but for whatever reason they chose to remove a beer from the list. The beer is Barnivore-approved, so I submit it not as an example of Yahoo! not wanting to promote alcohol but rather as another example of the global anti-vegan conspiracy.
Or maybe they just wanted to leave room so I could add a limited-edition food to the list. Are you ready? Here it is:
Any vegan menu item at any major restaurant chain.
We rejoice when a chain adds a vegan item to the menu, but we’re generally quiet when it gets pulled. We make excuses like “I try to support local vegan businesses” or whatever, conveniently forgetting how excited we were when things like the vegan brownie came to Starbucks (even if it looked kind of poopy.)
New food items of any kind take a lot of work to gain traction, and by work I mean major marketing dollars, and the sales levels the companies are looking for simply aren’t the kinds of things the vegan community can sustain on its own – sorry folks, we’re simply not big enough, and 1% of the market isn’t going to be able to move that needle far enough even if we try to convince (or double dare) our non-vegan friends to try new things.
Thankfully, product managers seem to have short memories, or simply move on to new jobs, and it’s just a matter of time before the new guy thinks that vegans would be a good market to cater to. And it begins again. Every once in a while, something sticks, and the company rejoices (food illness scares are generally, but not always, lower with vegan products, as are ingredient prices.) Over time, a very long time, vegan selection improves.
In the meantime, enjoy your limited edition whatevers while you can – each time you try them really might be the last.
It's not the school I mind, it's the damned Big Mac theme song that they keep chanting at the football matches...
Remember when people would get upset about fast food getting to close to the classroom? Yeah, things have gotten a bit beyond that, with McDonald’s set to offer its own university program. I’m not talking Hamburger University here either – this is an accredited degree course at Manchester Metropolitan University, whose new slogan is probably officially something to do with getting fries with that.
I don’t know if the program is available to the general student body or just McDonald’s staff, but I do see from their website that MMU offers a degree in Honours Business Sandwich, so there’s that. It’s not clear what’s actually in the sandwich, so for clarity vegans should petition for the more obvious Honours Business Salad, and if someone can get on that I’d appreciate it.
Despite the easy jokes (OK, I make them look easy, but that’s just the years of training kicking in,) the course doesn’t seem to have much to do with flipping burgers – it’s a management program, for managers, who will learn how to manage, likely in a managerial fashion.
And I’m sure there’s some kind of, oh, perhaps financial incentive for MMU to get on board with this thing, but if I were them, I’d push for some alternative concessions as well. Perhaps the licensing of some of McDonald’s characters for us in Inappropriate Creative Writing 101, or for the fashion program, a competition for new uniform design (did I mention the word crotchless yet? I thought it went without saying, but it is fun to say.) The biology department could get first dibs on any, er, samples left in restaurant washrooms. Yes, any samples. The list goes on and on, really, and what’s money compared to the chance to teach our up and coming youth how to write McDonaldland porn scripts for these guys?
I figure all McD's needs to do is introduce a mascot character in a lab coat, and they're instantly credible. Photo via FailBlog.
Here’s an outreach idea we need to consider a little more: let’s get some vegans in charge of the menus. That’s what’s going down at Florida Hospital Memorial Medical Center, where Shawn Noseworthy, director of food and nutrition services – and vegan – is remaking the menu for the hospital café.
If you’ll forgive me: the meals may be low in sugar, but this news is sweet.
Now, the final menu probably won’t be 100% vegan, but the foods will actually have some kind of connection to health, which is more than a lot of hospitals can say these days – the last hospital I visited had multiple outlets of a popular donut shop for patrons to get their fix, and it didn’t take much searching to find one with a McDonald’s in it. I’m actually scared to Google to see if one can buy cigarettes in any of these places. Maybe there’s one with an unmonitored shooting range or something.
This is so screamingly obvious to me that I have to wonder why we don’t see more veganizing of hospital food in general. Is it just that it’s bad for business, either in landlord fees or revenues from medical procedures? That last bit sounds a bit cynical, but c’mon, how hard is it to accept that broccoli is better for you than a bacon double cheeseburger?
Then again, maybe people figure that this is simply the safest place in the world to eat this crap.
We’re talking about buildings where they can actually get people to turn off their cell phones, so it’s not like people don’t accept that there will be “crazy” rules to adhere to. This should be a no brainer, and instead we’ve got to wait for one-off “odd news” stories to surface about crazy experiments like this one.
Anyway, kudos to Noseworthy for her efforts, and hopefully we’ll see more stuff like this in the future.
Great, now you can only get a swell toy like this if you buy fruits and vegetables
The Twitterverse was all aflutter yesterday, not because of these “election” thingies, but because San Francisco has banned the McDonald’s Happy Meal. Sure, maybe I need to rethink my Twitter following habits, but frankly, I think we’ve all got our priorities handled just fine.
Of course, the Happy Meal isn’t what’s being banned, just the current form of the thing, which is a toy to bribe kids into eating crap. Apparently McDonald’s food is so terrible that you have to convince a 4 year old to eat it. Uh huh. Under the new rules, toy distribution will be linked to fruits and vegetables, and if you have too many calories, sugars, or fats in the meal, then you can’t have a toy, because apparently the grease is the toy.
There may be other meal-toy hybrids affected by the ban, but everyone is on about the Happy Meal.
Well folks, I’m here to tell you that this has nothing to do with healthy eating. Just like movie studio execs who are busy making films based on the cartoonsoftheirchildhoods, politicians have apparently reached the magic age at which they can all remember when McDonald’s toys didn’t suck even more than the food.
Seriously, I don’t know how we did this without the internet, but as kids we would pick which fast food chain we wanted to go to based on the toy that was on offer that week. Somehow we all knew what the options were, networked as we were in some kind of child-brain-mesh, even if we didn’t know anyone who’d been to a burger joint that week. And the toys were cool. OK, they were crap, but compared to the crap of later years? Awesome.
This is going to actually set veganism back 20 years. If we can’t convince people McDonald’s sucks on the basis of the toys, we’re going to have to do a lot more work to educate people about nutrition, environmental impact, and so on, and risk stupid lawsuits in the process. I’m just thankful I held off an extra week before ordering my cases of “go vegan, the other guy’s toys suck” buttons… Now everyone’s going to think fruits and vegetables mean crappy toys. Follow the money, it’s a sneak attack!
Via Colleen: a medical paper, an actual scientific document that’s going in an academic journal, and not just Crazy Jay’s Great Spots for Cheap Beer (I revolutionized the study of geography with that one) but the Canadian Journal of Cardiology, this paper, the one of which I am speaking right now, exists solely to tell people that eggs have more cholesterol in them than a KFC Double Down sandwich.
You know, it’s a sad world when we rate our foods the way we rate our politicians: “well, this sucks, but you know what’s worse?” Yeesh.
Of course, the egg industry is not amused with the comparison. It would appear that it’s “irresponsible” to make the comparison, because there’s some nutrient somewhere that the egg wins out over, and the unhealthiness of eggs has never been proven – at least not to the egg industry’s satisfaction. Here’s how the animal-based food people work: if there’s a study or two that backs them up, regardless of how specialized they are, and despite any other studies to the contrary it’s conclusively in their favour, and if the backup study hasn’t been found yet, “the jury’s still out.” Because this jury has been told they won’t see their families again until they arrive to the verdict that Judge Eggo wants.
But we don’t need to eat eggs to die from them. If you throw them at a gold Mercedes, you run a high risk of getting shot. Which seems somehow obvious to me, but my sympathies to the family. If someone egged my car, I’d probably just call it a hate crime and get widely mocked, but if I had a gold Mercedes I bet people would treat me differently. That’s it, people, go vegan, get a gold Mercedes. That’s the campaign. Note the fine print now; it’s not “go vegan and you will get a gold Mercedes,” just two separate commands. Be creative. The Secret says it’ll happen magically, but be sure to do it in the order specified, just in case.
I used to work in a job that did marketing promotions online for various media companies. Usually these were pretty benign campaigns, but from time to time the secondary sponsor would push my sense of ethics a bit. There wasn’t anything too bad (amazingly I avoided the dairy boards and big fast food during my 5 year tour of duty,) but once or twice I’d have to do something I wasn’t terribly comfortable with.
Anyway, I’m out now, and if I ever get another job I’ll be looking for something that’s safe from that kind of thing – I just didn’t like the conflict between my desire to do a good job and my desire to completely destroy what the “payer of the bills” stands for.
Still, there are times, often daily, where I see something and can’t figure out if it’s sheer marketing blunder or if there’s another vegan out there who chose route B.
Your case in point for the start of this long weekend: last month we talked a bit about a McDonald’s campaign involving super heroes. One group’s approach was to complain that the action figures were violent. Another group, apparently, either infiltrated the company or implanted subliminal messages to make Happy Meal toys like this one:
(and yes, I know Batman isn’t a Marvel hero. It’s probably another campaign. I can choose to watch what McDonald’s does every second of the day or what Batman does. Batman usually doesn’t make me throw up. OK, maybe a little.)
There are backstories to things like this that almost make me want to get a job in marketing again and deal with all the ethical crap, just so I can hear the tales. Someone had to have known what this would look like. Was it a dare? Did nobody want to speak up? Or was this actually on purpose?
None of this matters, really – McDonald’s is going to keep doing what it does, and people are going to keep eating there. A wanking Batman just doesn’t have the power to massively change consumer behaviour. It’s just funny, and if you can’t laugh at stuff once in a while, animal activism can get pretty depressing.
Both Colleen and PonderingWillow sent links to the latest McNonsense, which involves a woman trying to order Chicken McNuggets, but in the morning, when apparently you can’t get Chicken McNuggets, but don’t try to tell this lady that, or she’ll, well, she’ll go nuts, is what she’ll do, as captured on ye olde security footage.
After almost standing up for a McDonald’s campaign earlier this week (I maintain I was standing up for the Fantastic Four, and McD’s just got lucky,) I’m almost afraid to say this: I feel a little badly for the workers.
The workers, mind you, and not the corporation that sets things up in a way that this continues to happen (see our earlier survey of violence at McDonald’s.) Fast food workers are overall having a better go of it than slaughterhouse workers are, but cheap meat ain’t cheap, if you get my meaning. And before someone else says it, no, fruits and vegetables don’t have the best labour record either, but I’ll maintain that it’s a less violent form of oppression overall, which isn’t to say it’s OK, but, but, hey! I’m talking about McDonald’s here.
But besides the workers, you know who else I feel a little badly for? America. The links I received are from the BBC and a major Canadian newspaper, and unlike stuff that actually affects our lives, this is the kind of thing that gets sent around the office, and sadly, this is how other countries think everyone in the USA acts. I’m not even kidding – take the weirdest set of stereotypes about veganism you’ve heard from non-vegans, and then think about how people can categorize other large groups of people. Yeah.
Update Aug 12: Matty sent me the YouTube version so we can embed it. Mostly I just like saying embed:
Anyway, I still worry that I’m getting soft on McDonald’s, so here’s something else in my “use this image someday” folder that seems like a good way to show my colours:
(In the interest of full disclosure, I’m a big fan of the Fantastic Four, the comic, not the movies, particularly in my adult years, but my family will attest to the fact that the ranting they’ve had to endure for the past half hour is not biased by this at all.)
Hey, you wanna know what else? The McDonald’s promotion features the mutilated corpses of multiple animals. I’ve personally reached a point where they could put live ammunition in a Happy Meal and it wouldn’t offend me less.
But oh, wait, yes it can. Because now I’m a parent, and I read things. Things like how children are much more likely to eat like their parents eat. It’s interesting, not having been to a McDonald’s for anything other than the use of their washroom for many years now, I hadn’t realized that they now serve Happy Meals with apple slices instead of french fries and apple juice instead of soda (details as PDF here.) None of that matters though, because the kids are watching their parents eat the fries and drink the pop, and guess what they want to mimic?
Seriously, even if it’s not the parents, it’s going to be the people they see in line. And with obesity rates being what they are, I think they’re going to see a lot of stuff, and it’s going to be a lot scarier than anything you can put in a box as the “prize inside.”
There was a time where I might (thought I doubt I’d go this far) reach a little to find something to complain about McDonald’s about. But really, the appropriateness of the toys? I’d rather hope for a world where eating dead animals requires as much imagination as the idea of the Human Torch.
Oh, and I found this picture at one point in my research for this. It’d be a shame to waste it:
It seems that, in my absence, because yes, they clearly waited until my eyes were off the prize, McDonald’s has commenced plans to introduce smoothies to their restaurants. The move is expected to line up some competition with places like Jamba Juice, which has counter-fired with something they call the Cheeseburger Chill:
Except not really. It’s a joke, but they did make a spiffy website to promote it where you can get a coupon for a dollar off any actual smoothie they make. Which might be tasty, or might contain donkey; I really don’t know because they don’t have them up here. Smoothies, that is. Donkeys we have in abundance thanks to the Donkeys For Igloos exchange project the Canadian government whipped up a few years back to modernize our villages.
So here’s the riddle of the day: would you stop at a McDonald’s, say, on a road trip, for a smoothie? Let’s assume that they make something remotely healthful – it’s quite possible that these things will end up being watered-down McFlurries with fruit, if a McFlurry is actually a thing – it sounds like something they’d make, and I’m picturing something like a Blizzard or Frosty, but I can’t visit their website to research it without risking an outbreak of Yelling At The Computer, which wakes the baby. Seriously, I’m not even allowed to watch most current affairs shows on TV anymore.
Anyway, if McDonald’s made a fruit-based drink that could legitimately tide you over and contained zero cheeseburger, would you try it? As a last resort when on the go maybe? Or just plain never?
Via Colleen: a medical paper, an actual scientific document that’s going in an academic journal, and not just Crazy Jay’s Great Spots for Cheap Beer (I revolutionized the study of geography with that one) but the Canadian Journal of Cardiology, this paper, the one of which I am speaking right now, exists solely to tell people that 
(Story via 