Do black people really love McDonald's? I'm sorry, Mac-Donald's. What? That's not racist. I ride BART, that's how people say it. I'm just an observer.
Watching this afternoon's NFL Wildcard Playoffs I've been inundated with a variety of ads portraying a variety of sharply-dressed, smiling black tweens, teens and twenty-somethings enjoying such dubious fare as the "Mac-Snackwrap", the rather optimistically named "Big-N-Tasty(r)" or (shudder) the "McRib" quote-unquote sandwiches. These actors certainly seem happy... almost deliriously so.
Me Gusta Mas!?!
Several of the ads also feature Hispanic and Asian actors, similarly overjoyed with their greasy "McNugget" and "Filet-O-Fish" value meals, not necessarily respectively. Has McDonald's truly found the secret sauce? Have they tapped into today's multi-cultural youth market? Are the ethnic kids of today really "lovin' it"?
I'm not convinced. In fact, I believe McDonald's secretly aspires to be the home of modern-day peasant food, cheap and plentiful in a shiny pop-culture wrapper. But if I understand my history (see Wikipedia) peasant food has a rich, if not healthy, legacy; if peasant food is McDonald's aspiration then they're missing the mark wide and low.
In medieval times the peasant-farmers harvested wheat, which was stored and served to the nobility. Instead, the poor were left with lesser rye and barley for their bread, while simple beans, nuts and cabbage provided proteins - these were combined with leeks, onions and garlic into soups. Simple. Hardy. Healthy. Plentiful? Not always - the bubonic plague devastated the size of Europe's population, but the good news is that if you survived there was plenty to eat!
Ironically, while the land owners and aristocracy gorged on breads, butter, wine and fatty red meats the working and lower classes survived hand-to-mouth but were actually eating a much healthier diet. Though life expectancy in medieval times was uniformly the low-30's the rich were probably dying from heat disease and cholesterol while the poor were dying from the squalor of their environments and the unforgiving nature of their working conditions.
So what does porridge, ale and the black death have to do with McDonald's? Peasants ate what they could cheaply produce, there often wasn't enough to go around, it was bland, but at least it was cheap and relatively good for you. By contrast, McDonald's sells a wide variety of reasonably good-tasting choices (thank you modern chemistry and good old-fashioned sugar and salt), they produce it with assembly-line efficiency and it'll kill you if you eat enough of it... but at least it's cheap!
With all due respect to capitalism I can't fault McDonald's for trying to make every dollar they can, that's the American way! Right? Then why does every McDonald's TV or radio ad make me so uneasy? The answer is walking (or shambling) through the food courts of every shopping mall in the country: great big fat people. I can't lay the entire blame for obesity squarely at McDonald's feet, but I can hate them for pushing their vision of fit, hip, happy black/hispanic/asian young people on everyone.
I defy you to visit a McDonald's in any major city and see anyone eating there even remotely similar to the folks in their ads? Instead, what I see are poor, working class mothers w/ strollers, wild children running-screaming-coughing-touching every possible exposed surface and small, isolated pockets of elderly folks drinking Styrofoam cups of McCoffee. About the only thing the McDonald's marketing folks got right are the skintones.
Where am I going with this? You could be forgiven for thinking I wrote this on the couch watching a football game. You'd be right! I guess I'm just expressing a little blog-based fury at the callousness of the McDonald's corporation. They're selling a trendy, lifestyle-based atmosphere and giving the impression their "food" is reasonably healthy. But they're really killing us, one value-menu item at a time.
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