SUPERSIZE ME CORPORATE BACKLASH

McDonald's fights back. From the London Independent via ZNet:

Even before the Australian counter-attack, an outfit called the American Council on Science and Health started ripping into Super Size Me in a series of press releases, op-ed pieces and capsule opinions offered by purported dietary and health experts. Another organization, called Tech Central Station, offered itself as a clearing house of opinion and factual evidence, condemning Spurlock's film as a scurrilous, misleading, "disgusting", "dangerous" and "dishonest" piece of work.

The American Council on Science and Health has not publicly disclosed its corporate donors since 1991, but in the past they have included crisp manufacturers, chocolate manufacturers, Burger King and Coca Cola (a business partner of McDonald's). Tech Central Station, meanwhile, is backed by the oil giant ExxonMobil, General Motors and, yes, McDonald's.

One op-ed piece, by the food industry lobbyist Jim Glassman, made its way into a couple of US papers, including the St Louis Post Dispatch, which apologized after it discovered his direct links to McDonald's.

Click here for the rest.

I haven't seen it yet, but living in a college town, it ought to be relatively easy to find a screening somewhere. The trailer's pretty cool.

The health ramifications of a McDonald's only diet reminds me of how, after reading Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation a while back, I quit eating hamburgers altogether for over a year: it turns out that because of corporate meat-packers' efforts to cut costs by relying on inexperienced, non-union butchers, there is a pretty darned good chance that, anytime you eat a hamburger, you may be, quite literally, eating cow shit. Remember the E. coli poisonings of the early 90s? That was the first indication that union-busting in the slaughter industry could have deadly consequences. Their solution was to cook the meat longer, killing the deadly bacteria. Unfortunately, the shoddy butchering practices continue, so hamburger meat often has shit in it--don't worry; it's a standard fast food industry practice now to cook out the E. coli, so you probably won't die from it.

But isn't it a nice thought to know that every three or four hamburgers you munch, you're eating shit?

Yeah, yeah. I finally went back to eating hamburgers because I love them. I just try not to think about it. But still...

Anyway, back to this embryonic McDonald's counteroffensive: it's not the first time this has been done, and if history is any indicator at all, it may very well get nasty. In the mid 90s, McDonald's sued a couple of British activists for libel; the standard for proving libel is much lower in Britain, and McDonald's basically threw it's entire corporate mass at these two people--the activists lost the case, but embarrassed the hell out of McDonald's in the process, and won a huge moral victory. Still, they were scared silly, and totally stressed out by the whole thing: Mickey D is an evil, mafia-like bastard.

Here's hoping this latest counteroffensive doesn't get that far.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$