: : I must admit that I'm confused. Why would McD's allow itself to get sucked into litigation that could only end in poor PR? I am also confused by the fixation on McDonald's. As far as I can see it, their great sin is that they are big, international and succesful. : I am affraid this is absolute nonsense George. The real sins of McD are manifold including: Abusing the trust and loyalty of children, spreading false info about their products, cruelty to animals, exploiting their crew by paying low wages and total lack of tolerance of freedom expression criticism. And these are certainly important points.
: The issue at stake is not whether people should or should not eat at McD. They should certainly be free to exercise choice. What is at stake is whether consumers can make an informed choice without access to full information about the product they are consuming. All companies would like to keep their customers in the dark about their products if they think that would help sell more. But what is wrong with big multinational companies like McD is that they do it and they often get away with it. Partly because they have huge resources to throw at their critics and partly because they can take advantage of the differences between regulations and laws of different countries to promote their practices. For exemple McD would have never sued Dave and Helen for libel in the USA. The only reason McD took such drastic action against them in the UK is that somebody in the company obviously thought they would win the case given the complexity of libel laws in this country and Dave and Helen's lack of resources to defend themselves properly.
: :I enjoy eating meat, I consume a balanced diet and I feel healthy. I have 'fast food' around once a month, but I eat meat 4-5 times each week. Should every producer of animal products be pursued?
More nonsense, George. While "fast food" is wrong for all the reasons stated above, meat eating has been clearly and conclusively linked to degenerative disease in humans, as well as in animals ("mad cow"). Ethically, taking a healthy animal, subjecting it to confinement and its ills, and then killing it in order to consume its flesh, has been compared and appropriately, I believe, to the genocide practiced during WWII. Isaac Bashevis Singer has said that until humans cease flesh eating, there will always be war. George, consider this empathetic exercise: imagine yourself an animal, destined for slaughter. Imagine yourself at birth, taken from your mother, confined in darkness and solitude until the time you are taken for slaughter. The fear, the terror, the sense of betrayal. Do this exercise until you are able to feel again the connection you have apparently lost to the rest of creation. Then, change is inevitable.
