I’m sure by now you’ve all seen the excellent Super Size Me, the entertaining documentary in which New York filmmaker Morgan Spurlock demonstrates that eating exclusively at McDonald’s for a month will, gasp, make you fat.
Sal and I caught it a couple of weeks ago, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Of course it’s a one-sided polemic, but it’s a very funny one-sided polemic, and, unlike watching, say, a Michael Moore documentary, you don’t spend most of the film wanting to slap the documentary maker for his self-righteous hypocrisy.
When we left the cinema, I vowed to change my habits, and we immediately popped over the road to the supermarket to stock up on fruit and veg (although the new extra-healthy regime lasted about 2 days, before I went back to exactly the same habits as before).
Anyway, the reason that I mention this now, is to draw your attention to the hilarious response from McDonald’s: Super Size Me: The Debate.
It is of course not a debate at all, just some PR in the form of a flash animation that tries to explain why McDonald’s isn’t all that bad. I particularly love the “True or False” section, which contains true or false “questions” like the following [emphasis mine] that have been carefully worded to enable the website to answer false every time:
– “McDonald’s never display any nutritional information anywhere in their restaurants”
– “All McDonald’s salads contain more calories than a Big Mac”
– “McNuggets are made from every part of the chicken…”
Truly excellent: it’s rather like a politican dodging an awkward question (Interviewer: “George Bush: Have you ever taken cocaine?” George Bush: “I didn’t take cocaine in the 1980s…”), but they’ve saved the best for last:
– “That film Super Size Me has really got McDonald’s on the run”
No, of course not–just scared enough to create a flashy website and spend a whole pile of cash on careful PR to refute its clearly baseless claims that eating bad food isn’t good for you.
2 replies on “Reasoned Debate”
Not necessarily the film, or the profit drop, or the journalist’s piecemeal attrition – but Dad is rattled a little. For the first time ever, his jovial rebuttle of the detritus that gets thrown at his work has strayed into more humourless teritory. Our stores still out-perform the region. But this is his pension, Mum’s retirement, my life.
Personally, I blame Doctors (oh and technichal writers and lawyers…) for making our nation fat.
RT (Attache in the West)
Oh, especially Technical Writers. They’re the worst.