Filed under: Food + Health, J500 Week 7, Society + Media | Tags: cheeseburger, chicken nuggets, fast food, food inspection standards, McDonalds
When I was a youngster, every Saturday was game day. Being a bit of a tomboy as a child, I loved to play sports. So each Saturday, I was in one of two places-on the basketball court or on the soccer field.
However, as much as I looked forward to expending my energy on the basketball court, it was what followed each of my games that made my heart race with excitement. That was knowing my dad would be taking me to McDonald’s.
Photo by mbell1975/Courtesy Flickr
During my adolescence, I had an adoration for eating under the golden arches, or what my dad and I refered to as our “weekly ritual.” I fondly remember stepping through the doors of McDonald’s and immediately having my senses delighted with the aromas of oily fries, greasy cheeseburgers and deep-fried chicken nuggets. As a child, these unhealthy fast foods had become a staple of my diet. I am not completely sure how McDonald’s cuisine (if it can even be described as such) became my comfort food.
Photo by SuellenLemos/Courtesy Flickr
At the ripe age of eight, my palate was accustomed to greasy, fatty foods and as a result, I requested it more often. Coincidentally, there happened to be a McDonald’s conveniently located a few blocks from my elementary school. On the days my mom picked me up from school, we would make a pit-stop at Mickey D’s and pick up my favorite after school snack- an order of large fries. I am a creature of habit and cheeseburgers and fries were my food habit. Being raised in a time when fast food restaurants are abundant and within blocks of one another, it was exceptionally easy for me to obtain. Unfortunately, the news isn’t any better for kids nowadays. Apparently, a new study found children in the United States are getting over a fourth of their daily calories from junk food.
Even more troublesome is a report by USA Today, which said that the beef and chicken supplied to schools is not checked nearly as rigorously as McDonald’s, Burger King and Costco, which cautiously scrutinizes its meat for bacteria and pathogens. When hearing information like this, it makes me cringe. Why aren’t government food inspection standards uniform? Inspection standards should be rigorous when it comes to the quality and safety of food. We place a certain amount of trust in our government to make sure that the food we eat won’t harm our health. So, whether it be a burger from Burger King or ground beef in a school lunch, it should become a habit for it to be examined closely and carefully.
Micole Aronowitz
Filed under: J500 Week 7 | Tags: deforestation, fast food, McDonalds, michael pollan, packaging, recycling, waste
My favorite childhood restaurant, like so many other people, was McDonald’s. I was a chicken Mcnugget Happy Meal with a Dr. Pepper kind of girl. It came in a cardboard box with fun drawings and games and, of course, you can’t forget the awesome varieties of gender-specific toys that came with it.
He's everyone's favorite red-headed clown, but it's a sad fact of life his happy meals contribute to deforestation, waste, and litter across the United States!
In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, author Michael Pollan remembers the same excitement I got as a child from unwrapping McDonald’s items, as if they were “little presents.” Even though McDonald’s fell out of favor with me, new Ronald McDonald enthusiasts are born every day, explaining its sales of over $5.97 billion, exceeding the $5.94 billion expected revenue. It’s easy to forget that as fast- food chains continue to grow, the need for wrapping up those “little presents” grows as well.
According to No Free Refills‘ (NFR) 2008 Fast Food Packaging and Production report, the Southern forests in the U.S. are the world’s largest paper-producing region, and the place most fast-food companies get their brand-specific packaging. The report claims 43 million acres of forests have been converted to pine plantations. The U.S. Forest Service states that now, nearly one in five acres of Southern forest are devoted to pine plantation.
Fast-food packaging isn’t only affecting Southern woodlands, though.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that in 2008, 32 percent of all waste came from packaging and containers, the highest contributor of waste accounting for 77 million tons. According to the NFR report, the average American eats fast-food more than 150 times a year and 1.8 million tons of total packaging waste is from fast-food.
To be fair, even NFR verifies that 83 percent of McDonald’s food and beverage packaging is made from some form of recycled paper or wood-fiber material. McDonald’s also reduced its waste by 1,100 tons from 2004 levels simply by making minor adjustments to french fry boxes in 2005. While I don’t mean to belittle such efforts, it seems as if McDonald’s overlooked perhaps the simplest recycling tool used in almost every school, office building and park-recycling bins.
According to a 2009 study conducted in part by Rutgers and Indiana University, the presence of a specialized recycling container reduced waste by 35 percent. So when children find items wrapped in McDonald’s packaging six times more appetizing than identical snacks in plain wrapping, as this 2007 Stanford University study found, it’s obvious what kind of recycling power McDonald’s could have.
Without recycling bins, one of the most recognizable signs of environmental responsbility, McDonald’s mission to be greener than the rest is very much underminded. While McDonald’s has implemented incredibly successful recycling bin programs in Japan, Canada, and Europe, such initiatives are severely lacking in the U.S. I know I’ve never seen a recycling bin in a Lawrence McDonald’s, at least.
The beauty of locally franchised McDonald’s though, is that customers have a lot of input. If local McDonald’s eaters decide they’d rather recycle than throw their paper bag, wax-lined cup, napkins, hamburger wrapper, french fry container and ketchup packets at the end of a meal, let the owners know. We may just find that all our fast-food friends need is a little nudge.
-Kayla R.
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Filed under: Food + Health, J500 Week 6, Society + Media | Tags: diet, food, Health, lifestyle, McDonalds, morgan spurlock, Super Size Me, taco bell
Jokes can be made all day long about the old axiom that “You are what you eat”. Most of these, as the title of this piece, are not actually good jokes, but I digress. Somebody’s lifestyle really can be judged by their diet. One of the most popular documentaries of the first decade of this century (annoyingly referred to at times as “the Aughts”) was Morgan Spurlock’s “Super-Size Me”, detailing his experiment with eating nothing but fast food for a month. The changes in Spurlock from the opening of that film to the end were dramatic. He began as a vegan, in apparently good physical shape, and ended chubby and constantly exhausted.
I bring this up because it gives new credence to the “you are what you eat” proverb. That famous film showed somebody healthy and vibrant to reflect a thought-out lifestyle, only to become fat and slovenly when switching to a diet oriented around food that is quick and easy to obtain without much effort.
I’m not a big McDonald’s fan, myself. Sadly, I do have a weakness for Taco Bell, their Tex-Mex counterpart. It, like the infamous Golden Arches, is cheap and easy to access, not even requiring getting out of one’s car if so desired. And when I go through phases where I frequent “The Bell” (as the cool kids call it), I’m usually feeling a lot lazier as well.
I’d like to say that my food habits only occasionally display somebody not interested in the experience of cooking a nice meal. The part of the pantry I claim (I share with four other people) consists mostly of sliced bread, bagels, soup, canned chicken breast, and cereal. Nothing I eat at home makes more than four minutes to prepare.
According to the “What does the food you eat say about you?” quiz hosted on ProProfs Quiz School, my eating habits are “Plain”. My habits, which range anywhere from dipping carrots in ranch to enjoying cereal. I am assessed as this kind of person:
“You definitely enjoy the simple things in life. You don’t make a big deal out of things and you’re not full of drama. You would be equally happy whether you were riding a bull in a bar or staring at your pet cat Fluffy for three hours. You’ve never really been dissapointed (sic) in life, but then again you’ve also never really won anything.”
My corner of the pantry.
This, of course, is mostly tongue-in-cheek. The thing is, I don’t entirely disagree with it (other than I am a dog person). So what does this make me, really? Lazy? Impatient? Or just generally apathetic about what deeper meaning my diet has. I’ve always assumed the latter, but then I usually don’t analyze the collective food that I keep in my house at any one time.
-Ben C.
Filed under: Food + Health | Tags: ingredients, McDonalds, Omnivore's Delimma, processed food, twinkies
I first heard of the 30+ ingredient anomaly in a class here at KU. It was Environment and the Society 420, and we read a book called the Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. Much of the book centered around the dominance of corn in about 65% of things on your grocery shelf, but in one part, he dissected a McDonald’s meal that he ate with his young son. In addition to finding corn in everything from the soda to the french fries, me mentioned that your average chicken mcnugget has 38 ingredients, hardly any of them having something to do with actual chicken. That astounded me. Now every time I hear McDonald’s mentioned I’m sure to throw out that disheartening factoid.
So, as frightening as it is, I wasn’t too surprised to hear about the Twinkie. The scariest thing about it, though, is that Americans are so settled into our over-processed food eating routine that it’s overwhelming to think about a dramatic change being made. Sure, we can eat locally when our markets are up in the summer, but no matter how hard we try to avoid eating foods with some kind of unnatural goo in them, it’s hard to keep up. In one of my EVRN classes we discussed how important is was to “vote with your dollar” to order to support local and organic farming, which can cost the farmer more than it would cost if they were to take the easier way of food production. But as much as I would like to, I can’t afford to shop and the Merc or Whole Foods. My grocery budget limits me to Aldi and Dillons. It’s a vicious circle I’m having trouble getting out of.
If anyone is interested, I found a Twinkie recipe online. Don’t worry, no mine shaft delving necessary for this one. Although it only calls for eight ingredients, one of them is a pre-baked yellow cake. I wonder what’s in there…. here we go again.
Photo from slantmouth.com/category/world/
-Amanda Thompson
Filed under: Business + Politics, Food + Health | Tags: chipotle, fast food, McDonalds, organic, panera bread, starbucks
I think One Week’s Worth of Food Around Our Planet just reaffirms that we are on the right track when it comes to starting to eat in a “greener” way. Did you notice that in every picture of these families that the ones who have the majority of natural foods also have the lowest costs per week? I think it would also be safe to assume that they are also the ones that spend the least on transportation of these foods and save the most energy.
Now as far as the United States versus the other countries in consumption level, I’m not sure these pictures tell us anything we don’t already know. We consume too much unhealthy food, we use way too much packaging, we don’t recycle enough and we spend the most money. Go figure. But on a more positive note, America is changing. Maybe it’s not noticeable to some yet, but slowly but surely, America is changing the way we eat. Organic food is one of the most rapidly growing trends in America today, and this is for a number of reasons. The biggest reason is the health and wellness benefits associated with natural grown food, they are healthier, safer, better tasting, and more sustainable.
Photo: lindvall, Flickr
In America, we are known for our high consumption of fast food. But now companies are taking their own steps to make their food healthier and more environmentally friendly. Panera Bread now offers a large selection of natural and organic foods, McDonalds sells organic milk at their locations, Starbucks now offers Fair Trade coffee beans as well as organic milk, and Chipotle has pork-free carnitas!
Photo: -clb-, Flickr
Many environmentalists will argue that this is simply not enough. I agree. If McDonalds wants to be considered environmentally friendly it needs to come up with it’s own organic Big Mac that tastes exactly like the real one and find some way to make all their wrappers biodegradable. But until that day comes, I will commend them for making the effort and hopping on the bandwagon to becoming eco-friendly. Soon many will follow!
-Sarah Nelson
Filed under: Business + Politics, Food + Health | Tags: greenwashing, McDonalds, McToxins, media literacy, Paul Hawken, public relations
I’m always amazed at the way in which my classes complement one another, build on one another, challenge one another and inform one another. This class always seems to be at the center of those relationships. I’ll give an example. In public relations class we have begun to study effective tactical planning and strategic media use. Naturally, we have looked at real-world examples of successful PR planning. On Monday we watched a short video clip from the mid-1990s? from ABC News. The clip was a short feature story on McDonald’s’ campaign to help poor farmers across the globe find niche goods to sell at market prices in order to prevent them from having to resort to environmentally unfriendly ways of making a living (i.e. cutting down rain forest trees for logging etc.). I’m glad McDonald’s had such a system but it should also be looked at skeptically. I was a little troubled with how this clip was presented in class as representative of the “green branding” of McDonald’s – as if stories placed strategically by effective public relations practitioners make McDonald’s green. In this sense, the perception of social responsibility, the public relations facade, is more important than actually being deeply committed to environmental stewardship. McDonald’s has certainly done some good things, but rarely on their own. It took, for example, a vigilant activist initiative, the so-called McToxins campaign, to get McDonald’s to finally stop using styrofoam packaging. McDonald’s public relations representatives even claimed at one point that styrofoam was good for the environment because it helped aerate the soil in landfills.
My public relations class is committed to the philosophy of “values-driven” public relations (it’s even the name of our textbook), yet this example seems to ignore “values-driven” business. You simply cannot have one without the other. For McDonald’s to be truly “values-driven” they would have to adopt sustainability as a chief corporate interest, as much a part of their national identity as the golden arches logo and the Big Mac. They have hardly reached that point, as Paul Hawken acknowledges in this article from the San Francisco Chronicle.
I’m not trying to rip my public relations class (it’s a really interesting, well-taught class), but it worries me a little bit that this example was used as effective “proactive” public relations. Honestly, “proactive” public relations begins with ethical business, creating a socially responsible culture that values human rights and social justice. Creating that type of corporate environment is in itself good public relations. It’s not manufactured narrow-mindedly. It’s important, in my opinion, to study not just the mechanisms of PR but also learn public relations literacy so students can recognize the agenda’s that underlie the media messages they receive. Combining these two would ensure students are not just good at public relations but more informed and perceptive citizens. I’m trying to make myself more questioning and more aware of where exactly the news I read and see is generated. It’s hard and I’m not very good at it.
So how can we avoid being duped by greenwashing? Improving media literacy? Is calling greenwashing manipulative an overstatement? Is the McDonald’s example truly good PR and I am way off?
-Vince
Filed under: Business + Politics, Food + Health, Society + Media | Tags: food costs, Grain, junk food, McDonalds, U.S. economy
Anyone else find this photo creepy?
Something about the sunglasses, I guess. Or the export of American culture.
The photo dipicts clowns who were on hand to celebrate the opening of a McDonald’s in Beijing, and it was part of a New York Times article about the company’s record profits in February. McDonald’s profits jumped 11.7 percent internationally, fueled in part by Leap Year sales but also the weak U.S. dollar. You can get more Mac for your Yuan these days.
I’d like to use that story to play the Six Degrees of Separation game. But instead of people, in this instance, I’d like to look at the short distance between food news. We know McDonald’s is doing well – that’s one data point. Let’s put another marker by the story that University of Washington researchers determined that calorie for calorie, junk food is way cheaper than good-for-you food. According to the researchers, who compared foods in major grocery stores in the Seattle area, you pay $1.76 per 1,000 calories for sugary, fatty foods that have the most calories, but you pay $18.16 per 1,000 calories for the lowest-calorie foods (which are most often better for you, such as fruits and vegetables).
Now, here’s our third degree: increasing food costs overall. We’ve endured a 4.2 increase for meats, fish, veggies, fruit, dairy and eggs in 2007, and there’s a predicted jump of 3.5 to 4.5 percent in food costs for this year. May not sound like much to you as an individual, but when you add in higher fuel costs for gasoline and heating your home, you’re bound to notice it.
And finally, there isn’t enough grain to go around. We’re looking at a worldwide grain shortage brought about in part by more people on the planet, corn-hungry biofuels such as ethanol, and fewer acres to grow food successfully. Or, you can think of it the way Daniel W. Basse of the AgResource put it in this comprehensive look at grain shortages:
“Everyone wants to eat like an American on this globe,” Basse said. “But if they do, we’re going to need another two or three globes to grow it all.”
When I look at the big, big picture, taking all this news and more into account, I’m scared by what I see coming together. A faltering U.S. economy. More people are cash-strapped and rely on unhealthy, calorie-dense foods. Those unhealthy foods gobble up lots of resources (transportation, grain for animal meats, land and plastics for packaging, among them). Global warming may restrict those resources even further. At the same time, prices for all foods are going up, driven in part by scarcity of supply. Already, some nations have to safeguard grain supplies that are distributed to keep people from rioting.
There’s no easy way to answer such a complex economic web of problems. But I think that if anything would bring about change to the American, Western diet that the world seems to embrace more and more often, it’s going to be the force wielded by economics. If there isn’t enough money to buy meat, or bread or milk, at some point we will be forced to go without it. I wonder how that will affect that jump in profit at McDonalds?*
*And I’m not picking on McD’s as the evil empire, but they are a mom and apple pie export of American living, as well as an enormous corporate success. About 47 million people each day eat at the 31,000 McDonald’s locations worldwide. That’s roughly the entire populations of Greece, Australia and the Netherlands combined.
–Jen Humphrey
Filed under: Waste + Recycling | Tags: Consumption, McDonalds, recycling, trash, Weight Watchers
My current trash situation isn’t really indicative of the norm. My third roommate just moved out to pursue what I think will be a successful career. During his short tenure with us he set astounding records for waste (terrible terrible stench too – I became interested in incense soon after his arrival). Before he left he threw away half his stuff and gave some of it to me. We are running out of room in our garage for all the trash he left behind. He threw away numerous cardboard boxes, an entire sack of fine expensive clothing, and some inspirational weightlifting posters. His computer is still sitting in our living room waiting for a large man to come and pick it up. I’m considering recycling it or selling it on Ebay. It’s astounding the things rich people throw away. Our previous roommate (yeah, we’ve cycled through quite a few – apparently my current roommate and I are not super fun to be around or something). Well, this guy, besides doing silly things like accidentally enrolling in classes at the Edwards campus, used to eat at Taco John’s 3-4 times a week. He ate every single meal at a fast food establishment and somehow maintained his weight of approximately 115 pounds. This produced an unbelievable amount of trash! Now there’s only two of us left and we do a pretty good job of keeping things under control. We produce about 20-25 pounds of trash between us a week which isn’t bad. He eats a lot of sandwiches and I eat a lot of Honey Bunches of Oats. I also inadvertently bought those Smart Ones Weight Watchers meals awhile ago. Now I eat them all the time. For dinner typically I eat chicken nuggets and possibly a canned vegetable. If I’m feeling adventurous I try a cheap box of “Thai” food, that Simply Asia stuff. (I’m still waiting for Simply Turkmenistan or Simply United Arab Emirates). Anyway, neither of us are wasteful or voracious consumers of anything. As echoed in much of the reading for this week, the real problem is our (U.S. population)’s insatiable need for things and the tremendously wasteful production processes that make help us fulfill that need. Neither one of us need a lot of things.
My trash is mostly cardboard and waste leftover from my Friday morning McDonald’s routine. As alluded to in an earlier post, every Friday for the past eight years I gobble down a plate of pipin’ hot McDonald’s flapjacks and 2-3 cups of pipin’ hot McDonald’s coffee. I get McDonald’s coffee 3-4 days a week. There isn’t much virtue in my vice, but the new McDonald’s coffee is great … and ultra-caffeinated. I can’t help but wonder though why McDonald’s needs to use so much styrofoam packaging. They agreed in 1987 to phase out styrofoam, but they still use a tremendous amount of it. It provides the “plate” and “lid” for my flapjacks. They do deserve some credit, however, for listening to consumer disapproval and at least trying to uphold bits of their corporate social responsibility statement.
While my roommate and I aren’t beacons of a zero-waste lifestyle, we do, however, have an almost militant adherence to recycling … and for good reason. Between the two of us we drink 4-5 12 oz. cans of Coke and Pepsi a day. I also have a very obsessive-compulsive relationship with newspapers. I read 6-7 every morning and stack them in the corner. I make sure the stack is perfectly even. When my roommate throws his UDK on the stack (making it uneven) I become furious. By the end of the week my newspaper stack is about a foot and a half tall and it all gets recycled. Sometimes I stare at the stack with a marveling gaze. We’re not perfect but we aim to try.
Here’s my garage:
The (in)famous newspaper stack – notice how uneven it is
Me being buried by trash
Me buried in trash and holding up engine coolant
-Vince Meserko
J500 Media and the Environment 
