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Welcome to McWorld, Meanjin 57 (1) March 1998, pp 104-115

John Vidal McLibel: Burger Culture on Trial Macmillan
George Ritzer The McDonalization of Society Pine Forge
McSpotlight <http://envirolink.org/mcspotlight/help.html>
Welcome to McDonalds <http://www.mcdonalds.com/>


VINCENT: You know what the funniest thing about Europe is?

JULES: What?

VINCENT: Its the little differences. I mean, they got the same shit over there
that we got here, but its just, just, there its a little different.

JULES: Example?

VINCENT: Well ... in Paris, you can buy a beer at McDonalds. And, you know
what they call a Quarter-Pounder with Cheese in Paris?... They call it a Royale
with Cheese.
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My home town of Katoomba, surrounded by a forbidding wilderness, is one of
Australias major tourist destinations. Last year, in the sauna of the local health club,
my neo-feminist cartoonist friend and I met Mr X, renowned in the Blue Mountains for
his vehement advocacy of McDonalds. Fixing us with his glittering eye, Mr X
marshalled arguments with well-rehearsed cogency. McDonalds are clean, quick,
predictable and cheap. A restaurant for passing motorists would have little effect on the
cafes catering to longer term visitors but would be welcomed by poor local families
uncomfortable with their tourist trendiness. It would provide badly needed youth
employment for the town. Work-discipline is good for young people and Macdonalds
is good for everyone: look at its worldwide success. Drawing these threads together he
reached his conclusion: only wankers hate Macdonalds. When he departed we owned
up. There are a lot of wankers in Katoomba. In recent years a loose coalition of
greenies, retirees and restaurateurs has rebuffed two attempts to open a McDonalds
there, though as I write it looks as if a third attempt might be successful.

A local Maccas would add nothing to my life. But away from home I am sometimes to
be found chomping at a Big Mac, less from hunger than fascination. To enter
McDonalds is to enter a precinct of the global bland zone, the zone of shopping malls
and airports and hotels with a few stars. Its a zone drained of character and memory, a
happy consumerist complement to prisons and concentration camps, a variation on the
austere animating principle of modernity: repetition; endless, utilitarian repetition.
Usually I dont feel very comfortable in a McDonalds restaurant. But occasionally,
chomping on my Big Mac, I find myself leaning to Mr Xs point of view. Here is a
capitalist paradise, busy workers and hungry customers and enterprising franchise
holders cast into mutually beneficial synergy by international finance. Here is a kind of

1
Tarantino, Quentin Pulp Fiction Faber 1994

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democratic paradise: people of all creeds and occupations, mingling on the one level.
Here also is an industrial, almost one might say a socialist, paradise: cheap food,
efficiently distributed to the masses by a grandly rationalised system of production.
How could any reasonable human being hate this?

The opposition to McDonalds is many-faceted. McDonalds, say critics, is a major
player in global agribusiness, a system that produces great wealth for a minority while
millions toil in poverty and lets millions starve while others grow unhealthily fat.
McDonalds food is a nutritionists nightmare - high in fats, sugar, salt and chemical
additives, low in fibre, vitamins and minerals. Its presentation produces enormous
quantities of waste packaging. The burger is a meaty food item, and meat is an
ecologically inefficient food that encourages the destruction of forests for agriculture.
McDonalds employs young workers at low wages and has a very high labour turnover.
Except in Sweden and Ireland it has succeeded in keeping its workplaces union-free:
the organisation cannot trust the individual; the individual must trust the organisation
said founder Ray Kroc, a dour battler whose ship came in. Although it claims with
some plausibility to discriminate only on the grounds of ability to serve the corporation,
the upper echelons of the company are overwhelmingly white male.
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Unlike Benetton
or the Body Shop, it has not sought to promote itself as an icon of global cultural
integration. Instead its advertising campaigns usually target young children, promoting
the fictional clown Ronald McDonald and fun gimmick give-aways. Manipulated or
not, children like McDonalds restaurants: almost unique among public spaces, they are
child-friendly. This is another source of complaint. When your kids bully you into one
you have to contend with what complaining parents call anal retentive pricing
policies, whereby if you buy the special happy meal you have to have a soft drink and
not a shake and unless you do you cant get the toy Dalmatian or whatever.



Many simply find the whole concept of fast food offensive. Jim McClelland, writing in
support of the campaign to stop McDonalds in Katoomba, attacked the company for its
vulgar ambience and the pervasive smell of frying. Let the satanic golden arches in
and in no time Katoomba will be another Surfers Paradise.

George Ritzer outlines a
theory which might rescue this aesthetic from anti-democratic snobbishness.

He sees
McDonalds as representing a set of wider cultural changes in the direction of
efficiency, calculability, predicability and control. Consumption is being automated, a
supposedly rational process that is actually producing irrationality and
dehumanisation. Ritzler discerns McDonaldization everywhere - in credit cards, plastic
cutlery, chat lines, tabloid newspapers; even in films with roman numerals after their
names.

Anti-McDonalds campaigners are passionate and often flamboyant. Last year about
100 people from a Czech environmental group protested against McDonalds in Brnos
main square. Dressed as business people with death masks they chased two ecologists
in prison clothing through the streets, shouting We want to consume more! Destroy the
tropical rainforests! Throw ecologists in jail! Lets grind nature into hamburgers!
Garbage is great!. After capturing the fugitives outside the McDonalds branch they
conducted a trial which culminated with the clown Ronald McDonald executing them.
The cheering protesters dashed towards the store with champagne to celebrate another
victory for multinationals, but despite constant chanting of We like you! and We
support McDonalds the store management refused to let them in.



2
Gabriel, Jon Racism, Culture, Markets Routledge 1994

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Evidently the growing numbers of McDonalds customers around the world are not
much affected by the chorus of reproach, and surely they have a point. Get rid of
McDonalds and people would still eat bad food, produce huge heaps of garbage,
destroy forests, exploit young workers and target children with manipulative
advertising. International capital would still rule. The war with McDonalds, like so
much politics, is a war of symbols. James Cantalupo, the president of McDonalds
International, boasts that the chain is a symbol ... of an economic maturity.

A real
urban centre needs a McDonalds, just as it needs a few skyscrapers, a conference
centre, a sports stadium and a symphony orchestra. But for its opponents McDonalds is
a symbol of the triumph of artificiality, homogenisation and triviality. The hostility has
deep metaphysical and mythic resonances. McDonalds seems tainted by pretence,
quintessentially inauthentic. The bright colours, hard laminex, stainless steel kitchen
and cute uniforms are like a stage set. Its food is not prepared like normal food, but
designed. Like colourised film, or a dubbed actor pretending to sing, it is not really
food at all. It is simulated food. Perhaps it is this feeling, more than the excess fat and
sugar, which makes some people feel ill after eating it. In sophisticated circles
encounter with the corporation is tucked safely away behind ironic quotation marks.
What makes the What makes the Pulp Fiction dialogue amusing is surely that we feel
superior to the low life on screen, though at the same time recognise that the basis of
this feeling is uncertain. , while at the same time recognising uncomfortably that the
basis of this feeling is uncertain. We would never make the gangsters mistake of
confusing real national differences with fast food marketing. Or would we? What kind
of mistake are they making?

If authentic things are those which are true to themselves, then McDonalds is in the
vanguard of a movement away from truth, pushing out towards a giddy state in which
nothing is true to itself and reality has no meaning. When everything that is holy has
been profaned there is only one place left to eat: under the Golden Arches. It is an old
tune. The fear that authenticity is being leached from life has haunted modernity. In the
early twentieth century Max Webers iron cage of reason was supposed to be turning
everyone into mindless bureaucrats, while at about the same time Emile Durkheim
worried about the more or less opposite state of anomie, the chaotic state which
threatens complex societies in which relationships are based more on contract than
authority. Earlier, there were Hegels and Feuerbachs and the early Marxs plays with
the idea of alienation. In Anthony Giddens recent account the prevailing atmosphere of
existential anxiety accounts for the most prominent movements of our times: the
sequestration of experience, whereby madness, criminality, sickness, old age and
death are isolated because they disrupt our fragile everyday lives; the rise of life
politics, the pursuit of individual emancipation; and the yearning for tradition,
registered by the worldwide tumults of religious fundamentalism, national chauvinism
and cultural revival. Giddens argues that these phenomena are attempts to recover
authenticity for lives threatened with loss of meaning (Giddens).
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We seem doomed to
become tourists, seeking out cultural shows and theme parks, therapists and health
clubs, in a vain attempt to quench our thirst for the true.

All of these scenarios represent historical change as corrosive in some way of authentic
Being. They display a deep worry that modernity has about itself. The McDonalds
publicity department stays alertly proactive, eager to soothe this worry. Last Christmas

3
Giddens, Anthony, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern
Age Polity 1991

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it unveiled the astonishing Golden Arches theory of conflict prevention, possibly
uncovered by researchers at the companys Hamburger University: no nations with
McDonalds restaurants have ever gone to war with one another. Apparently people in
McDonalds countries dont like to fight wars. They like to wait in line for burgers. In
the wake of this revelation journalists referred to the McDonalds family of nations
and reported that hopes for stability in the [Middle East] are bolstered by the news that
McDonalds is coming to Jordan (Langton).

However, most McDonald's customers
dont worry a lot about the world economic system or the International Labour
Organisation, and clearly are not put off by the smell of frying. As for nutrition, an
internal company memo once admitted that We can't really address or defend nutrition.
We don't sell nutrition and people don't come to McDonald's for nutrition.

But in
countries with political significant environmental movements - but only there - the
company tries to demonstrate sensitivity. Recycled paper appears instead of styrofoam.
In Australia they once promoted membership of the World Wide Fund for Nature -
apparently without WWF's knowledge. Recently they opened four restaurants in the
USA called 'T.E.E.M.' - 'the Energy Efficient McDonald's - designed to lower
electricity consumption by using state of the art information technology.



When publicity fails to dampen criticism the company, like all big corporations, resorts
to whatever legal muscle the laws of the country of operation permit. The First
Amendment limits its ability to silence US critics, but most governments have tougher
libel laws. In Britain many political groups and media outlets, including the Guardian,
the Sunday Times Magazine and Channel 4, have been threatened with legal action. But
as the case that became known as McLibel shows, litigiousness can backfire, even
when you have the best legal team money can buy.

In the late 1980s McDonalds hired undercover private investigators to finger the ring
leaders of a leafleting campaign organised by London Greenpeace, a rogue breakaway
from the parent organisation. Relying on the unavailability of legal aid for libel cases in
Britain, the corporation issued writs against five protesters for statements made in a
leaflet distributed to customers. Two activists, David Morris and Helen Steel,
unemployed and with no significant assets, refused to back down. With the aid of
35,000 raised by a solidarity campaign and free legal advice from some sympathetic
lawyers, they took on the companys silks. Auberon Waugh called the resulting David
and Goliath contest the best free show in town. It became a worldwide focus for anti-
McDonalds campaigners and was by far the longest civil action in British history,
taking in 28 pre-trial hearings, 313 hearings and appeals to the British Court of Appeal,
the House of Lords, and the European Court of Human Rights.

The trial was a public relations fiasco for McDonalds. Ex-employees testified to illegal
and unethical practices, executives admitted lying about recycling and the importation
of Brazilian beef, one of the companys undercover agents came in from the cold and
testified for the defendants, the official Operations Manual was read in court, with its
instructions to executives to exploit childrens love of Ronald McDonald, a nutritionist
equated McDonalds food with Sellotape, and a medical witness for the plaintiffs
inadvertently agreed that the pamphlets comments on its health risks were very
reasonable. Meanwhile, in the streets outside the courtroom, more than 2 million
leaflets repeating the original allegations were distributed. Eventually the judge ruled
that most of the pamphlets criticisms were libellous in terms of British law but that
many were partly justified, including accusations of manipulative targeting of children,
cruelty to animals and shabby employment practices. On forests the defendants seem to
have lost on a technicality. The pamphlet referred to rainforests instead of tropical

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forests. Awarded total damages of 115,000, McDonalds, which spent about 10
million on the case, made the best of a bad job and said it would not try to collect.

Within months of closing in late 1996 the case spawned two televised re-enactments
and a book. John Vidal covered the proceedings as the Guardians Environmental
Editor. In McLibel he tells a story both hilarious and pathetic, somewhere between a
public enquiry, a post-mortem on industrialisation, a Greek tragedy and a Carry On ...
(and On and On) film.

He depicts a confrontation between two cultures barely able to
communicate with one another, each walled within its own values, customs and sacred
things. On one side American corporatism, Western materialism and the British
Establishment, on the other two people who describe themselves as anarchists, who
turn out to be two fairly typical young dropouts from Thatcherism, intelligent but not
intellectual, passionately political but engagingly uncynical. Vidal uses the two
cultures idea to maintain a veneer of liberal balance. After all, if it is not the truth but
a culture clash that is at issue, who has the right to decide? But he overdoes it, and in
any case his sympathies are never in doubt.

The impressive website McSpotlight was established by sympathisers of Steel and
Morris to spread news of the trial and other campaigns against the company. It claims to
have been accessed 1.5 million times a month, and a CD Rom of its comprehensive data
is in preparation. McDonalds official website, allegedly a counter to McSpotlight, does
not entertain even the possibility that someone might have a negative thought about the
organisation. It is all bright cartoon colours, in contrast to McSpotlights sinister glints
on dark metallic surfaces. Click on Kids or Adults. As a kid you can find out how to
volunteer for a McDonalds charity, check the giveways (Hey kids, rejoices Ronald,
this is advertising!), discover how many sporting events the company sponsors, or
read about a day in the life of a McDonalds restaurant. In McWorld you can vote on
what you would do if kids ruled the world (extend summer vacation till Spring? Make it
illegal for parents to wear socks with sandals?) The Adult section is pretty similar,
except that theres stuff about paid as well as volunteer work. Youre urged to check out
McWorld at the childrens site, ignoring the signs that warn No Parents Allowed. To
me there is something faintly off-putting about this casual bad faith.

Twenty-five years ago, when McDonalds began to go global, it was welcomed or
attacked as a representative of American power. Today it is ubiquitous. To dislike it for
being American is like disliking paper for being Chinese or algebra for being Islamic -
or the hamburger for being German or Tartar or whatever it is. Hordes of imitators
attest that if McDonalds collapsed there would still need to be something very like it.
Since McDonalds cannot now be plausibly cursed for being American, logically it
should be cursed for being global. But the opposition to McDonalds is itself global,
and mostly led by people who think globally and are most effective when they organise
globally. Therefore they dont oppose it for being global but for not being really global.
McDonalds, they claim, imposes a superficial homogeneity on the world. Its globalism
is only apparent, yet another aspect of its general fakeness. Frequently the implication
remains that nationalism, by contrast, is real, truly authentic. David Morriss revealing
response to the theory that McDonalds nations dont make war was Maybe thats
because theyve nothing worthwhile to fight about.



However, if scholars of nationalism agree on anything at all, it is that nationalism too is
always fabricated. World, nation, region, community, even the individual self, are
historical creations, artificial not natural. The identities based on them have been
facilitated by successively more powerful means of communication: conversation,

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writing, print, electronic media. None is intrinsically more or less real than any other. In
Benedict Andersons influential theory, the nation is an imagined community,
projected from the implicitly more fundamental reality of the face-to-face community.
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But this process of seeing through has no reason to stop at the level of the community.
A community is also imaginary, and the self also can be seen through. We do not need
psychoanalysis to perceive its fragmented character, its lack of authenticity. Already in
the eighteenth century David Hume wrote
The mind is a kind of theater, where several perceptions successively make their
appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of
postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor
identity in different, whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that
simplicity and identity.
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Vidal reports a succinct remark of Akio Miyabayashi, the Managing Director of
Minolta Europe: globalisation means loss of old identity. New identities created.

As
McDonalds fabricates global identity it also fabricates national and regional identities.
Already, after only a decade or two, many differences fracture its supposed
homogeneity. In Muslim countries McDonalds use halal meat. In Saudi Arabia they
close 5 times a day for prayer. In Israel their burgers are kosher. In India lamb is used
instead of beef. In Spain, which like France is graced by the Royale, you can not only
get a beer (or mineral water or milk), but choose from 4 kinds of salads with ingredients
like tuna, prawns, olives, ham and slices of boiled egg. In Malaysia chilli sauce is
routine. The McDonalds in Hong Kongs Victoria Peak complex sells a Shogun
Burger, a soy-flavoured beef patty with plum sauce, presumably for Japanese tourists;
where few tourists go the Hong Kong menu is hardcore American.

The Celebrating McDonald's in Australia tablemat is a small example of national
assertion, a testament to the gravity of the local. Its caption boasts that 98% of
McDonald's 'product' (sic) is made in Australia. McDonald's is Australian, it tells
customers, as Australian as Buttercup, Edgell-Birds Eye, Kraft and Coca-Cola. To
object that these companies are mostly owned and controlled by non-Australians is to
miss the point. As the Sufi poet Jalal al-din Rumi wrote more than 800 years ago

Your real country is where youre heading,
Not where you are.

And is the chronicle really more impoverished than any popular history? Since when
has history for most people been more than a succession of unexplained victories and
disasters, sporting and entertainment personalities, changes in consumer fashion?

The yearning for authenticity involves an untenable essentialism, the belief that some
things (society or community, home cooking, peasant farming, national identity) are
intrinsically truer and purer than other things (industrialised food production, targeted
advertising, global identity). The former supposedly manifest their essence, the latter do

4
Anderson, Benedict Imagined Communities Cornell University, 1984
5
Hume, David A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739. Book I, Part 4, Of Personal
Idenity.

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not. Or, in the existentialists tighter formulations, the authentic is that about which we
do not lie to ourselves.

Of course authenticity and inauthenticity exist: I can threaten someone with a real gun
or a toy, write a serious article or a spoof, find and be myself or copy others. But this
kind of inauthenticity seems relative. A toy gun may not be a real gun, but it is a real
toy. I may try to be true to myself, but who am I really? To imply that some things are
intrinsically inauthentic is to assume an essentialist metaphysics, a belief in essences
which real things partake of in order to be what they are. Authentic things are known by
knowing their essence; inauthentic things lack essence, so they cannot be fully known.
They are unnecessary, unreal.

Debates have raged about essentialism for millennia. In Western philosophy it has
usually been out of favour, the conventional wisdom being that post-Galilean science
achieved spectacular results precisely because it staked its claim only on the observable.
But regardless of essentialism as metaphysics, it is not a serious proposition applied to
the entities known to everyday experience. Authenticity may be found in eternal forms,
or god, or consciousness, or faith, or perhaps in sciences cosmological formulae, but
not in features of the world like nations, communities, or the self, at least in its normal
sense of an obscurely articulated social entity, physical body, and state of
consciousness. Most certainly essences are not to be found in food. Applied to food
authenticity is simply an example of a ritual trope, the idea of purity. That by which we
feel polluted we call false, seeking redemption in the essential waters, or essential fire,
of truth. The anxiety that the world is being drained of authenticity is a recapitulation
of the age old archetype of the withdrawal of the holy, the Gtterdmerung. It is not a
useful theory about what is happening.

When Vidal writes that the playing field for capital is being smoothed out at the
expense of the social, he is pointing to something real and important, but is surely
mistaken to put it in those terms. Far from being anti-social, capital is pre-eminently
social. The concerns raised by McDonalds are about social structure and the effects of
hectic social change, not sociality and authenticity. To dislike McDonalds for being
ugly, unhealthy, exploitative and environmentally polluting may be reasonable, but to
hate it as a symbol of culinary inauthenticity and global homogenisation is to resort to
magical thinking.

Yet I cant help feeling glad about the heroic, hopeless stand of Steel and Morris. A
couple of scenes in the film Autumn Moon, directed by the Australian Clara Law, nicely
capture my ambivalence. A Cantonese schoolgirl, shortly to rejoin her parents in
Canada, meets a lonely Japanese man in Hong Kong. Halting English is the only
language they share. He wants her to take him to a good restaurant: he claims
implausibly that he cant find one in Hong Kong. She doesnt know any either. Im
very hungry now, he begs. I want to eat something traditional. So she takes him to
McDonalds. This is tradition? he asks. American tradition, she counters. Every
birthday of her life has been celebrated in this restaurant. Over there, in that corner.
Now she has to go to Canada. Never mind, he tells her. McDonalds is everywhere.
Its the same all over the world. The same in Canada. Its not the same, she cries.
They quarrel. The same. Not the same. Finally she takes him home, where he gorges
on her grandmothers food.
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Autumn Moon (1992), directed by Clara Law, written by Eddie Fong Ling Ching.

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