Interesting how the article and every single comment above starts with the assumption that “all McDonald’s food is bad for you”. What is the basis for that?
Their menu has a mix of choices. An Egg Muffin is an English muffin split with ham, egg, and cheese, pretty much the same ingredients you’d find anywhere; you wouldn’t claim the exact same food was unhealthy if you ordered it elsewhere or made it at home.
If you walk in their door, do you really have to leave your brain outside in the car, and mindlessly order the double-patty artery cloggers with a stupid-size fries and a jumbo shake? Is their menu jiggling really as effective as a Jedi mind trick? Or is it that you really just want to believe in an “evil corporation”?
Interesting. Someone is rewarding fast food eaters with small cash rewards if they solve simple logic problems. Is this some sort of breeding experiment? Is this the Trump Lebensborn?
I highly doubt McDonald’s is serving people food without additives and filler. A perfect example is comparing the ingredient list between US french fries and UK french fries.. Extrapolate that over their menu and you can get a picture of food that is inherently unhealthy even if they were to offer “healthful” options. Also who seriously goes to McDonalds to order something like a salad?
I can only speak for myself, but for me it’s the nutritional fact sheets that McD provide.
Every once in a while, sure, why not.
As a steady diet? Not a good idea.
Just using your post to point the obvious: Mc Donald’s marketing is not designed for people who “don’t eat at Mcdonald’s” or even for people who don’t eat there regularly. It is designed for people who eat the same burgers so often that they can be tempted by the offer of a slightly different burger. All the people in this thread whose opinion start with “I eat something else than Mcdonald’s” (including myself) are not relevant because we are not the target. We don’t even see what the target people see when we look at the same advertising.
Actually, hamburgers are one of the least horrible fast food one can buy. But people who eat at burger joints tend to add fries and soft drinks and a wealth of other junk food and, statistically, they live 10 years less than average.
They don’t add those compounds to be evil, or as a mind altering substance. Methylpolysiloxane is a biologically inert chemical added to the cooking oil as an anti-spatter agent; it helps keep their employees safe from burns. Is protecting their workers evil?
Flip that around: if your local diner doesn’t add an anti-foaming agent to their cooking oil, their cooks are at a higher risk of spatter burns. Is it ethical for you to eat at a place that doesn’t do everything they can to protect their workers?
More on topic, though, are the advertising techniques in use. Does the average small-town diner feature carrots and celery in the display case by the register, or do they put pies, cakes, and cookies out front? Trust me, those display cases do a lot better job of tempting me to make poor food choices than does a wiggling picture of a McCookie on the McDonald’s menu board.
What I’m trying to say is that McD’s isn’t inherently any worse than many other places. They streamline to make more money because they can, but that doesn’t absolve any of the other preparers of food in your life. They aren’t trying to deliberately be unhealthy.
The difference between the two is likely to come from the difference in legislation. EU regulations do not require to list some of the ingredients required by US regulations. For goods sold both in the EU and the US (say canned goods or boxed biscuits), the list of ingredients on the box is different. You would have a box with two lists, one marked US and one marked UK, yet it is a single box with biscuits inside. The biscuits don’t magically transform when crossing the Atlantic.
This reminds me of the whole dubious “subliminal seduction” theory of advertising… That supposedly hiding the letters S-E-X in the ice cubes of a drink, or images of copulating couples that could only be perceived by your subconscious would make you be more inclined to purchase a particular brand of corn flakes.
The author of the books that popularized it gave a lecture at my school back in the 80s and during the q and a session, I asked him how seeing these things he said that he saw was any different than seeing bunnies in the clouds. I remember the professor and the people in the class who were believers looked at me like I was from Mars.
You have a problem with evo-psych, I noticed this in some of your previous articles too. The basic idea is that if we as a species exhibit a certain behavior or quality, it must have been adaptive; that’s why it propagated, that’s why we have it. Adaptive how exactly, that’s educated guesswork and I understand the criticism, but that part is not of primary importance. To me, the real value of evo-psych is in describing the human animal and providing insight to how we function today. H. Habilis appeared some 2 million years ago, H. Sapiens 200,000 years ago and agriculture emerged 20,000 years ago. Civilization happened yesterday, relatively speaking. Before that, we lived as hunter-gatherers for a very very long time and that is what shaped our brain, the same one we have today. Evo-psych does a good job reminding us that and telling what pushes our buttons (your McDonald’s et al. are particularly interested in this for manipulative purposes). Now, it’s popular to use Darwin to rationalize one’s lack of altruism, but that’s not what this is about. I’m a lefty with very humanistic ideals, ideals being the key word. The problem with humanism is that it insists on pretending we’re already somewhere we have yet to arrive. It emphasizes the positive and chooses to ignore the primitive, animal side of humans. Problems are externalized and attributed to politicians, poor communication etc, refusing to understand that the problem is inside us. I believe that humanity needs to progress away from ape nature, but step one is recognizing and understanding that nature. If you don’t account for it when building a society, you’re inevitably setting yourself up for a failure. E.g. communism was a nice idea and sentimentally I’m all for it, but it had complete disregard for human nature. It ignored tragedy of the commons and was oblivious to the fact that we’ve had social stratification ingrained in our DNA for millions of years. You don’t just decide to have a classless society. Classes will form naturally, in the form of privileged party members and also within the proletariat. You can’t eliminate it with a political system, only mitigate, install mechanisms that acknowledge the need for castes but prevent too much inequality. Capitalism, like feudalism, is set up for failure because it doesn’t put a cap on personal ambition and accumulation of wealth/power. By design it leads to imbalance that will get critical and break the system. Only if we understand our wiring and our limitations can we direct our growth and create stable conditions that nurture the good in people, and work toward a better world. I ended up writing a textwall about something that wasn’t even the focus of the article. I just wanted to say I find evo-psych interesting and relevant, even if dubious at times, and beneficial as long as we treat it as explanation, not an excuse.
I don’t know about moving menu items, health halos and whatnot, but I do know this: in the past couple of days, McDonald’s here in Australia has started advertising a wagyu burger. No idea what it costs but the very idea flummoxes me: if you’re interested in high-quality beef, surely the last place you’d go to try it is Macca’s. Perhaps it’s one of the things these ‘design tricks’ are made for - to entice people into trying something perceived as quality, and maybe therefore as healthier?
Movement indeed. David Letterman has a new show where he interviews folks. While the content is OK, I’m going to stop watching it because I can’t take the camera work. I guess they’re trying to avoid the static “talking head” esthetic, but the subtle, constant, relentless movement of the camera to capture things that aren’t moving drives me to distraction.
