16 - 23 April 1996
Each week McSpotlight will be updated on how the world's press has covered McLibel, McDonald's and multinationals in general.
"In a sense, the duo have set themselves up as McDopplegangers: their own refusal of hero-image and dogged dissemination of the facts is the inverse of the multinational's image-based, substanceless persona."
Howard: ...what we're looking at right now is we're following exactly the same path that they followed in England. Ten years of dealing with it as public relations rather than doing something substantial about it. 100,000 cows per year in the United States are fine at night, dead in the morning. The majority of those cows are rounded up, ground up, fed back to other cows. If only one of them has Mad Cow Disease, has the potential to effect thousands. Remember today, the United States, 14% of all cows by volume are ground up, turned into feed, and fed back to other animals.
Oprah: But cows are herbivores, they shouldn't be eating other cows.
Howard: That's exactly right, and what we should be doing is exactly what nature says, we should have them eating grass not other cows. We've not only turned them into carnivores, we've turned them into cannibals.
Oprah: Now see, wait a minute, wait a minute. Let me just ask you this right now Howard. How do you know the cows are ground up and fed back to the other cows?
Howard: Oh, I've seen it. These are U.S.D.A. statistics, they're not something we're making up.
Oprah: Now doesn't that concern you all a little bit, right here, hearing that?
Audience: yeah!
Oprah: It has just stopped me cold from eating another burger!
Winfrey said on her show she was shocked after a guest said meat and bone meal made from cattle was routinely fed to other cattle to boost their meat and milk production.
The camera showed members of the studio audience gasping in surprise as vegetarian activist Howard Lyman explained how cattle parts were rendered and fed to other cattle.
Other guests on ABC's Oprah Winfrey Show included Briton Beryl Rimmer, who said her granddaughter contracted CJD from eating beef. American Linda Marker said her mother-in-law died recently of CJD after eating beef in Britain in 1986.
News of the popular show's content swept through the cattle futures markets, contributing to major declines in all the beef contracts as traders feared it would turn Americans away from beef.
You ask me "How can you be sure that your beefburgers are absolutely safe?" The answer is simple. My beefburgers contain NO beef at all. They never have. This makes them the safest product currently on the market and I hope everyone is now thoroughly reassured.
BURGER OFF? NOT AT McGNOME'S.
B.S.E. Strobes
pp Lord Gnome
The Arches
London W1"
