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Reasoned Debate

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 thoughts on “Reasoned Debate”

  1. 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)

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