March 03, 2004

• I for one am actually sad to see the Supersize go. It was the perfect option for sharing with a group of 3 or 4 people.
• Don't be too sad. I'm sure it'll be back in a few months as "Family Size" or the "Big Guy's Meal."
• I don't think I want to live in an America where the anti-fat movement has this kind of power. Give me Atherosclerosis, or give me death!
• i'm happy to see this go, it was an insane amount of grease anyway and to be honest mcdonalds hasn't appealed to me in years. if i want fast food i'm much happier at a subway or other deli-style sandwich shop; if i want a burger i'll cook it at home so that i have some control over the quality of the meat that goes into it (sirloin is great, and turkeyburgers with smoked chipotle tabasco are amazing!). the flat (probably rat-meat to boot) greasy patty in a mcdonalds burger is just about as appetizing as eating steamed shoe leather. plus the burgers i make at home don't leave me feeling as if i've just scotch-guarded the insides of my mouth after finishing one. there are far too many heart-attack platters in the food industry these days. what about the swanson's "hungry man" meal? big, bold letters - "a full 2 lbs of food!" on the label. nice. it also had, let's see, somewhere around 2000% of the recommended daily intake of fat, 3000% salt, and i think a whole three days worth of calories. and that was just the breakfast. i think the dinner came with a free defibrillator. every time i see one of these things in the store i get kind of ill. we really don't need that much of anything. i feel guilty when my wife and i eat a "family size" thing by ourselves (of course, they always assume it's family size as they expect you to eat something along with it, rather than just the packaged whatever by itself). on a somewhat related note, when are we going to force people to put serving size info on food items that actually reflect the serving sizes people eat? ice cream for example... it doesn't look so bad, until you realize that they only expect you to eat 1/2 cup at a time. who the hell eats 1/2 cup of ice cream? there are supposed to be 8 servings in a pint of ben and jerry's? cripes! if they tell you how many calories are in an average-sized bowl, maybe people would be more likely to be concerned with their intake. it's far too easy to say "wow, only 70 calories per serving!" and then ignore the fact that you just wolfed down 30 servings at once... if they want the servings to appear to be lower in calories and fat, make the friggin' things better for you. don't cut the serving size in half then tell me it's lower in fat per serving than the other brand.
• babywannasofa Or they might just rename it "Large"
• All good points, clf. I agree that people would pay more attention to the quantities they eat if they got realistic information about calories, fat, sodium and sugar intake. On a good day, I can down half a pint of B & J's, on a bad day, all of it.
• First they came with their seatbelts, but I said nothing because I was a safe driver. Then they came for the cigarettes, but I said nothing because I wasn't a smoker. Then they came for the Quarter-Pounder With Cheeses, but I said nothing because I preferred Boston Market. Then they came for the Twinkies, but I said nothing because the creme-filling held no allure for me. Then they came for my vodka-and-tonics... and there was no one left to speak but me.
• I pretty much agree with you, Fes, although isn't this specific case just an example of capitalism at work? I mean, there's a huge difference between McDonald's voluntarily dropping super sizes and them doing it under governmental duress.
• True. But are they doing it for legitimate business reasons (to wit: no one buys the darn things, they're not cost efficient to offer, etc) or are they giving in to threats and bad PR from a vocal minority? The Spurlock film is coming out soon, according to the article, and while they deny it, it surely contributed. But you're right, this really isn't a case of that, either. I suppose my (badly made) point was, do we really need Spurlock to tell us that fast food is (gasp!) bad? Renaultian shock abounds. There must be a point where mandated - even internally-mandated - safety meets personal responsibility. I'd just hate to see the food industries, fast or otherwise, extorted and crippled like the tobacco companies were a few years ago.
• Over the past few years, McD's has added salads, frozen yogurt, and lite menu alternatives - now they're "reducing" portion size. What's next? Putting you on a treadmill while you place your order?
• fes, perhaps that's where we're headed - tobacco-style govt. restrictions on fast food. i can see it now. health warning labels on the kids meals, etc. and the empire of the golden arches will start putting forth carefully worded commercials, with good-looking, hip young people telling other kids that although eatin' mcdonalds looks cool and tastes great, they all have personally decided that it's best to wait until they're 18 to take that first fat-laden bite (with absolutlely no mention as to how the known health risks, addiction, and shortened lifespan influenced their making this decision.) (because if you outright condemn your own product, where will your future revenues come from? forcing tobacco to tell kids not to buy tobacco is a damn stupid idea. if anything, they should force the tobacco companies to give someone else the money to produce the commercials - that way they might have an actual impact.)
• You fat bastards.
• This is an incredibly smart (and evil) PR move on the part of Mickey D's. (1) It helps to satisfy the people calling for healthier food without actually making anything healthier. (2) It motivates the "personal responsibility" whiners (and I mean you, Fes) to work against the people who are working to make food healthier. (3 AND MOST IMPORTANT) It provides cover for McDonalds when they give all the smaller-sized products the same prices the super-sized ones have now. Giving us less for more, calling it healthy and blaming the people who know what healthy food is. I'd just hate to see a business like that "suffer" as badly as the tobacco companies have (compare McD's stock performance over the last five years to R.J.Reynolds). Yeah, I'm lovin' it.
• People don't *have* to work to make food healthier, Wendell. There's plenty of healthy food out there widely available, and with natural food stores and whatnot there's more of it available all the time. Just not at McDonalds. If one is concerned about the nutritional value of food, why not avoid McDonalds? Wait, I keep forgetting: the mindbending Svengalian power of Hamburglar and Grimace! Must...get...lava...filled...hot...apple...pie... compare McD's stock performance over the last five years to R.J.Reynolds Okeydokey! R J Reynolds Financial Overview Last Close 2-Mar-2004 $63.25 52-Week High $63.46 52-Week Low $27.52 Basic EPS ($41.17) Price/Earnings Ratio -- Current Ratio 1.23 R&D Expenditures (mil.) -- Ad Expenditures (mil.) -- % Owned by Institutions 85.50% 2003 2002 2001 2000 Annual Sales ($ mil.) 5,267.0 6,211.0 8,585.0 8,167.0 Annual Net Income ($ mil.) (3,446.0) (44.0) 435.0 1,827.0 McDonalds Financial Overview Last Close 2-Mar-2004 $28.42 52-Week High $28.76 52-Week Low $12.12 Basic EPS $1.15 Price/Earnings Ratio 24.71 Current Ratio 0.74 R&D Expenditures (mil.) -- Ad Expenditures (mil.) -- % Owned by Institutions 70.70% 2003 2002 2001 2000 Annual Sales ($ mil.) 17,140.5 15,405.7 14,870.0 14,243.0 Annual Net Income ($ mil.) 1,471.4 893.5 1,636.6 1,977.3 McDonald's made just short of a billion and a half last year; R J Reynolds lost nearly three and a half billion. I don't know about your company, but where I work, if our revenue was off a solid third in four years? There'd be suffering aplenty. If I wasn't enjoying my share of it (by having been fired) I'd be inflicting some (on my department). I apologize for the "personal responsbility" whining. I just believe that maximization of personal freedom of choice, for good or ill, within the law (and in some cases outside of it, since there are some pretty onerous laws out there on the books), is the cornerstone of freedom and, ultimately, democracy.
• Enjoy your McDonald's, Mr. and Mrs. Fatty McFatass. Your fat asses will grow fatter as you sit on them watching your fat tv with your fatass kids on their own fat asses and fat fat fat fat fat fat fat fat fat fat fat.... *heart explodes*
• I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the power of the marketplace resides with the consumer. If you feel that McDonald's food doesn't meet your nutritive requirements? Simply don't buy it. (I don't) If you feel that cigarettes are dangerous? Quit smoking them (I did). If you desire healthier, more nutritive food? Purchase it from places that sell it. (I do) If enough people care what they eat, McDonald's will change to meet that demand. It's simple - even elegant, in a way - business. If people want supersized 5000 calorie fatburgers deep fried in lard? I don't believe that people should stand in their way. Just because I don't want something doesn't mean it's wrong, or evil, or that those who supply lard-fried fatburgers are some sort of malevolent cult. I want people who want LFFB's to be able to get LFFB's. It's their choice, and if being Fatty McFatasses is the consequence, so be it. What I don't want is a small group of well-meaning but ultimately authoritarian people deciding for everyone what is good and bad to eat and what ought to be available. Eat what you want! But be cognizant of the consequences.
• first the demise of shamrock shakes, now this. *sigh*
• Fes, I think the key here is that most people simply don't *care* that McDonald's is bad for you. I become increasing more aware that society is all about the quick payoff ("Mmmm. Greasy burger taste good.") rather than looking at long term effects. Overall though I agree with you - if you don't want to eat it, don't buy it. We don't need no big brother making decisions for us, even though the average American can't make the decision himself. Screw him! Of course I find the thought of eating at McDonald's downright repulsive.
• What Fes said. I don't understand what all the fuss is about. While I think fast food is evil in general (and yes, I do eat it), I would prefer not to go down the road of not being able to do relatively innocuous things because they're bad for us in excess. Where does that stop?
• I'm just commenting here because Sooooz then Kimberly then me is like the good old days. The good old days when we had no members.
• As long as a corporation is being truthful about what goes into the triple cheeseburger of doom, they should be able to sell it. If nobody buys it, then nobody buys it. On the other hand, if seventy-five percent of America becomes overweight because of the burger, then so be it. Nobody forced 'em to buy the damn thing.
• I'm with Fes on the personal responsibility thing. But to add to Pez's statement, what about the cost of healthcare for the people that are too stubborn/stupid to eat fast food in moderation? That was one of the big issues with cigarette smoking that led the public don't-care crowd to support anti-smoking campaigns. American taxes cover a smoker's years of drawn-out care for emphysema or lung cancer. Fast food munchers get heart disease and the public, then, will pay for their healthcare because these few idiots were too irresponsible to look after themselves. I guess what I want to say, after rambling so badly, is that it should be a matter of personal responsibility but some people are less responsible than others, in which case this move might actually help.
• My source material: McDonalds RJReynolds Didn't even notice the last year's loss at RJR. If you look at the recent stock performance, apparently neither has Wall Street. But then the stock market is America's highest bastion of "personal responsibility", right? Be cognizant of the consequences. You must run with the Mensa crowd if everyone you know understands everything they're eating. The recent run of Atkins Propaganda has muddied an already unclear picture of the nutritional effects of a lot of food. The Mad Food Scientists employed by megacorps like McDonalds are way better at figuring these things out than the average eater, and I really don't think they are working in anybody's nutritional best interest. (If McD's labs had discovered a component in beef fat that is as addictive as nicotene, would we become aware of it in the next 40 years? Ooops... let me put away my tin-foil hat.) I'm all for people being responsible for what they do to their own bodies, but I am also all for holding people in corporations responsible for what they sell. And I wouldn't respect the people running RJReynolds whether they made 3 billion or lost 3 billion.
• a smoker's years of drawn-out care for emphysema or lung cancer *coughs, dies 20 years early, saving State a fortune in aged pension*
• BTW, I learned the real meaning of "personal responsibility", when, after working the best paying job of my life for almost 5 years (purely in Acounting and IT), the "Insurance and Financial Services" company collapsed under its own fraud, and I worked the next month answering phone calls from disabled people trying to live off of annuities the company had sold as bargain-basement "structured settlements" and tell them there was no guarantee they would ever get another cent. (And they weren't the ones who shopped around for the annuities...)
• And I was just notified that a discount cigarette website wants to buy ads on my blog. The easiest $49 I ever told anyone to shove up their ass.
• Issues of health affecting populations: guess I think of communicable diseases such as TB and AIDs, where both the Innocent and the Irresponsible may be overwhelmed in a pandemic as easily as the Responsible. Anyone can incubate drug-resistant strains or mutating forms of a once-familiar disease, and once that happens... *shakes head* Where does Typhoid Mary's right to spread a communicable disease because she insists on working with food stop -- and where does the society she infects begin to intervene (assuming a society with some medical knowledge? Where are the boundaries, if any, within such a scenario to be set? These are questions, alas, which societies and individuals need to deal with now, and the odds are high we will soon have to so increasingly in future as human populations swell all over the globe.
• Puzzling, I was trying to delete a phrase and -- plunk -- it posted instead. Touched neither Preview nor Post new comment. Hmm. Has this happened to anyone else?
• Meanwhile, in other news, the Nietzschean diet, which commands its adherents to eat superhuman amounts of whatever they most fear, is developing a strong following in America.
• ... it should be a matter of personal responsibility but some people are less responsible than others... Wait a minute, what? Did I miss something? Why are some people less responsible than others? Each person has to be responsible for his or her own body. Children are somewhat less responsible because they count on their parents for a lot of things, but I don't think that's what you meant.
• Sorry, I must have worded that wrong, Sooooz. Everyone is, of course, responsible for themselves. The problem as I see it is that some people take that responsibility more lightly than others, by which I mean self-abuse in the myraid of ways possible (heroin use, alcohol abuse, things which are clearly known to damage the body). Regularly consuming a supersize McDonald's combo is as much self-abuse as alcohol abuse, causing damage to different organs in the body. Maybe a lack of respect for one's body would be a better way to put it.
• As far as healthcare, that is a problem. Heh. I know. Charge people based on how much over the average weight they are. Dollar a pound. Underweight people get tax writeoffs. If the whole country gets fatter, then fat people will pay less obesity tax and skinny people will just pay less tax period. It'd be a boon for tobacco companies. "You know what helps you keep the weight down? Sweet cancery death sticks."
• The infamous HungryMan microwavable two pound breakfast: The first time I've ever seen a comma in the calorie count. 231% of your daily sodium!
• Wendell: I feel like I hit some sort of nerve here, and for that I apologize. It is not my intention to irritate you. Fact is, I agree with you, for the most part - it's true, that most people aren't aware of what they are putting in their bodies, but as a general rule it's not because the information is not available, it's because most people can't be bothered with that sort of thing. Government sets the baseline for safety - minimal amounts of foreign matter, nothing that will kill you outright, etc. - and the legal system enables those who have been injured to gain compensation. I also agree with you that, if a corporation knowingly and purposefully sells a defective or patently unsafe product, they should be held accountable. Tobacco could, I suppose, fall in that category, I'm no scientist so I don't know - but if it does, why not then simply ban it? If it doesn't, why extort money from corporations who are breaking no laws and providing a product to a market that demands it? You were perfectly within your rights to eschew the cigarette companies advertising - are they not within their rights to try and sell their product to those people that want it, and advertise it to garner as much of the marketplace as they can? As for your experience with the insurance and financial services industry (which, I might add, I work in), I feel badly for you. Whatever your employers were doing, that it ended up as you describe is not only despicable, it gives those of us who do work to aid our clients as best we can a bad name. I hope that they wre prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Believe it or not, there are a great many people in the corporate world who are not of the Enron and Worldcom ilk, who labor each day with ethics and honor, and go home each night with a clear conscience to an easy sleep. I number myself as one of them, and we believe, as you do, that those who lie, steal and run roughshod over the law and their clients deserve the full measure of accountability and punishment.
• But then the stock market is America's highest bastion of "personal responsibility", right? Of course not. Personal responsibility is... personal. It's yours and mine, not the NYSE's, or even RJReynold's. The stock market is where shares in companies are traded, bought and sold. A company's stock price on any given day is a measure of it's worth in relation to others, nothing more, nothing less. Many have this idea that corporations should act like people - with morals codes, charity, niceness, etc. Corporations exist for one reason: to make money. Government erects the field upon which corporations compete, and then they compete to the very best of their abilities in the endeavor of making as much profit as they possibly can. And that's all. At the same time, corporations are not run by inhuman artificial intelligences or demons summoned by the friendlies over at Wolfram and Hart. They are comprised of people - people who DO (or should, anyway) have moral codes, ethics, charity, kindness, a sense of fairness, and individual responsbility and honor. When the playing field is fair to all, markets are allowed to behave naturally, and the people operating the corporations do so with responsibility and ethics? That's the highest attainment of Capitalism, imo. Regarding health care: Isn't health care supposed to be for those who *need* it, not those that *deserve* it? For aren't those that deserve it often those same people that so rarely need it? Even so, not everyone who smokes gets lung cancer, or even sick. And not all lung cancers are smoking related. Who decides who deserves health care? Certainly not the physicians who opted to give David Crosby a new liver, or the diabetics on death row their insulin. And yet, a lung cancer vaccination is on the way. I personally take expensive statin to keep my cholesterol down and avoid heart disease. And to be sanguine, human mortality is yet still 100% long-term - no one is being *saved*, the inevitable is simply being postponed. Which is a very very good thing. I don't have a solution to the health care conundrum in this country - with no profit, there is not research, no new treatments or drugs; and yet, health insurance is an anchor around the ankles of businesses (the single most important, and most expensive, and most *icnreasingly* expensive, aspect of a companany's benefit package outside of gross salary), the managed care system is a shambles, the medicare and medicaid systems make managed care look *good* by comparison, and still millions of people don't have the insurnace coverage necessary to have regular checkups and he simple, invaluable medical procedure of just talking frankly with one's doctor from time to time. I'm not ashamed to admit that, when it comes to this conuntry's health care dilemma, I don't have a clue as to what to do.
• sorry about the typos, was thinking faster'n I was typing.
• do we really need Spurlock to tell us that fast food is (gasp!) bad Yes, because people are idiots. Cud-chewing, dull-eyed idiots, who won't associate living on partially hydrogenated vegetable oils and without B vitamins with feeling like crap until they see it explained with hand puppets. McD's can spin their new non-supersizing menu any way they like. It's still a good thing.
• 231% of cholesterol. Not sodium, cholesterol. /whistles, backs away
• forks - that was indeed the meail i was referring to... didn't remember it exactly, but it was enough calories to feed a small family for several weeks... (god, imagine how long a cockroach could live off of that!)
• There is one reason that we should expect corporations to act like people - I'm no lawyer and I might be wrong, but I believe that to be "incorporated" means that the corporation has been granted many of the rights of a person (as in "corpus"). Maybe someone who understands corporate law can explain how corporations differ from simple companies and businesses. But with rights come resposibilities to society.
• I absolutely agree with you, jb, to the point that with rights come responsibilities. I'm not sure, though, that a corporation has the rights of a person - the Constitution enshrines the primacy of the individual, after all. Does a corporation have a right to bear arms? Or need freedom to associate? The people that make up a corporation do, certainly, but the corporation itself is just a legal fiction, a framework within and through which people collect for an endeavor (to wit: profit making). It in itself has to existence or will other than what those who direct it and comprise it lend it. Nevertheless, I think the overwhelming responsibility a corporation would have to society would be "operate within the law." People, however, have additional and greater obligations.
• "Corporate personhood is a term to describe United States law that allows corporations to have 'inalienable rights' (sometimes called constitutional rights) just like (human) persons. The choice of the word 'person' in 'personhood' arises from the way the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution was worded and from earlier legal usage of the word 'person'.... Corporate constitutional rights effectively invert the relationship between the government and the corporations. Recognized as persons, corporations lose much of their status as subjects of the government. Although artificial creations of their owners and the governments, as legal persons they have a degree of immunity to government supervision. U.S. corporations are endowed with the court-recognized right to influence both elections and the law-making process."
• What Sooooz said. I stopped eating at McDonald's since I read Fast Food Nation . Although I still enjoy the occasional super-fat-bastard grease orgy, but I do it locally-owned purveyors of food poisoning fast-food places.
• Fast Food Nation should be compulsory reading. I wonder, has anyone (aside from the corporations the author wries about) debunked anything in the book? I assume that pretty much everything in there is true, but I wonder sometimes if there isn't a little Michael Moore-style spin.
• If I front the idea that people are mindless sheep in general (an idea I don't typically subscribe to), I'd like to submit that if we're going to quibble over things like health care and taxes paying for individual irresponsibility, we should be looking at the government mandiated health organizations. The food pyramid is irresponsible, the AMA advocates diets that are impossible for people to actually stay on, and medical research about the affect of blood sugar and obesity are tailored to propogate a decades-old hypothesis rather than actually look for answers about why people in the U.S. are so overweight. I worked for a public university's low-income education program and you should see some of the recipes they were foisting on people. Potatoes, corn, bread, white rice, etc. Oy! My pancreas hurts just thinking about it. So yeah. I'm glad McDonalds is getting rid of supersize for whatever reason, but I think it would be more important for nutritional scientists to get off their bums and stop relying on existing assumptions about how our bodies process food.