June 1987: Separating the Wheat from the Shaft

Here are the sentiments of an employee of a New York ad agency as reported in a national daily. All of this debate over nutrition in fast food restaurants, she begins, is absurd. People don’t go to McDonald’s for nutrition, she continues, they go there for fun. You bet: like when I go to movies, I go there for the popcorn.

One of these days, it will occur to those of us who still insist fast food is a hoot, that the real reason McD’s restaurants pile up such impressive numbers year after year is that people go there to eat, not to fool around. Because they go there in droves, nutritionists and others of their ilk whose obsession with health exceeds the fanaticism of anorexics, are determined to force restaurants (read “fast food restaurants”) to divulge in detail, in the name of all things edible, what’s in the food they serve.

Having defended the rights of any restaurant to serve whatever it wants to (all things considered, I keep telling myself, people dining out eat far better than they do at home), I now find myself agreeing in principle with those demanding ingredient disclosure. Conformity, I tell myself, is the better part of dissent.

It wasn’t easy to shift. I used to fault nutritionists for their madness—their incessant crusade to force restaurants (again: read “fast food restaurants”) to tell us what’s in everything they cook (see August 1978: Lowering Your Nutrition Consciousness). I still think many of them meander around the lunatic fringe, dilly-dallying with their egos, yelling at all of us to eat our spinach. Yet, of late, some of them, in their pursuit of the Holy Kale, have begun to make enough sense to those of us who eat out a lot that we, in turn, have begun to alter our eating-out habits; at least, those of us who take all of this stuff seriously. We now demand freshness; foods free from additives, preservatives, ites, ates, and dyes of all shades and tints; and menus with sufficient options to let us select the foods/courses we think are good for us and, to boot, taste good.

The trouble is that fast food restaurants don’t offer a wide assortment of choices. God knows they’ve tried (who can forget McRib?). There is also this: the perception still exists that fast food is junk food. Never mind how flawed the perception is: it’s persistent enough to send the Ayatollahs of Nutrition into a frenzy, screaming about unacceptable amounts of sugar, sodium, fats, and cholesterol. That they aren’t ever critical of white-collar eateries dishing up, say, the edible organs and offal of everything that moves, is moot. “Hi there, we have specially sauced and broiled bull’s balls today. Want to try some? We fry, sauté, and braise them in beef tallow.” White-collar eateries aren’t so visible or so large a target as a restaurant chain which measures its success in billions of hamburgers sold. The bigger the target, the easier it is to hit.

Now, because millions of us eat billions of hamburgers, tacos, pizzas, and fried chicken, nutritionists believe we ought to know what’s in what we eat. Agreed?

Of course. Reason enough McDonald’s recently launched what I thought was a respectable ad campaign that told us what was in the food they served. While other fast food firms fought among themselves as to how to pitch the product, McD’s, without any fanfare, rolled out its nutrition campaign. It should have silenced the critics. It didn’t.

No sooner had the campaign appeared listing the nutritional values of its menu (such as it was), then foodies, consumer health groups, and the Government lambasted it, finding it flawed and misleading

They would be well advised to back off. McD’s campaign is nearly flawless. So long silent about nutrition and diet, McDonald’s has unveiled a marketing strategy that tells customers what’s in the food they’re eating. Not only that, it is a model of what these campaigns ought to be. McDonald’s has reacted intelligently to the critics who demand to know what’s in its food. And it has done so substantively, rather than gratuitously; objectively, not ambiguously. It has told customers what’s in its food, how much it weighs, and what RDA percentages each item contains, exactly what nutritionists have been begging for. They are not content. Rather, they continue to squawk about junk food and grease. That’s not only unfair and subjective, it’s wrong.