Accidental Hedonist

Oh McDonald’s. Is there no food out there that you won’t turn to shit?

Mark Bittman explains:

The oatmeal and McDonald’s story broke late last year, when Mickey D’s, in its ongoing effort to tell us that it’s offering “a selection of balanced choices” (and to keep in step with arch-rival Starbucks) began to sell the cereal. Yet in typical McDonald’s fashion, the company is doing everything it can to turn oatmeal into yet another bad choice. (Not only that, they’ve made it more expensive than a double-cheeseburger: $2.38 per serving in New York.) “Cream” (which contains seven ingredients, two of them actual dairy) is automatically added; brown sugar is ostensibly optional, but it’s also added routinely unless a customer specifically requests otherwise. There are also diced apples, dried cranberries and raisins, the least processed of the ingredients (even the oatmeal contains seven ingredients, including “natural flavor”).

A more accurate description than “100% natural whole-grain oats,” “plump raisins,” “sweet cranberries” and “crisp fresh apples” would be “oats, sugar, sweetened dried fruit, cream and 11 weird ingredients you would never keep in your kitchen.”

Here’s what I take from this story. Typically with products from McDonald’s, there’s an argument to be made that they are making a cheaper product, and thus making it more accessible to those who frequent McDonald’s due to financial constraints. “Quality isn’t the issue”, the proponents for McDonald’s state. “It’s calories available for the cheap and convenient.”

Okay, that’s fine for what it’s worth. But as Bittman points out, such an argument can’t be made with oatmeal. It is already a cheap product starting out. No process out there makes it cheaper. With the ingredients added to the McDonald’s product, it makes it more expensive. So that rules out the “cheap calories” argument.

As for the convenience argument? It’s instant oatmeal for god’s sake. You have a packet, you add hot water, you wait a minute, you have breakfast. Outside of toast, it’s one of the easiest meals you can make.

Of course, McDonald’s is not saying that their food is cheap or convenient, at least not in regard to their oatmeal. What they are implying is that it is nutritious. (What they actually say is that it is “Wholesome“, which is little more than marketing speak to which we are to infer it’s nutritious nature).

The problem, as Bittman points out, is that their version has nutrition issues.

Incredibly, the McDonald’s product contains more sugar than a Snickers bar and only 10 fewer calories than a McDonald’s cheeseburger or Egg McMuffin. (Even without the brown sugar it has more calories than a McDonald’s hamburger.)

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. McDonald’s? If your listening, please take note. Stop. Just stop. Stop trying to pretend that you sell nutritious products. Embrace your fat filled pies and your calorie laden-burgers. Put the onus of healthy choice upon your customers. Because every time you try to sell a “healthy” product, it comes across as, at best, as lazy and hypocritical, and at worst, cynical manipulation to get people into your stores. As Bittman again notes “…if you buy oatmeal, they’re o.k. with that. But they know that, once inside, you’ll probably opt for a sausage biscuit anyway”.

Let me summarize the two key points in the New York Times piece entitled The Breakfast Wars:

• Starbucks is hoping that their breakfast sandwiches aren’t as crappy as their pastries.
• McDonald’s hoping that their new coffee isn’t as crappy as their old brew.

For the record, Starbuck’s new sandwiches are horrible. As noted in the article, when they cool down, they become nearly inedible.

As for McDonald’s – I haven’t eaten there in a long while, but I do note that here in the Pac NW, they are using Seattle’s Best, which is only marginally better than their old drip coffee. Seattle’s Best is also owned by Starbucks, which I find ironic, considering the points made in the New York Times piece.

Side Note: I’m of the belief that if the word “Best” is anywhere in the company name or a product that a company sells, they should have to prove it.

And yes, it seems as if I’m in a bit of a mood today.

Technorati Tags: Starbucks, McDonald’s

There’s something wrong with hospitals allowing fast food restaurants to set up shop in their buildings. I appreciate the need for the money that these franchises can bring, but it does give contrary messages to what many doctors speak.

One of the plethora of problems surrounding fast food restaurants selling themselves as a ‘healthy alternative’ is that they get to say the following (presumably with a straight face):

“McDonald’s has a long history of leadership in providing wholesome food made from quality ingredients,” said Bill Whitman, a McDonald’s representative. “We take great pride in providing our customers with a wide variety of menu choices that can fit into any nutritional requirement or dietary needs.”

Sorry Mr. Whitman. Fast Food is many things, but healthy isn’t one of them. No amount of spin can change that. Setting up shop in hospitals is opportunistic and classless. Nothing more.

Technorati Tags: Fast Food, Hospitals

With all of the talk surrounding good and bad foods at the fast food restaurants, it’s important to note why most of these places offer at least two or three items that could be called healthy.

Hint: It’s not because they’re looking out for their customers health.

Buried deep within this article of Guardian gives the real reason why lip service must be paid to the health conscious.

Burger King can’t afford to ignore health-conscious vegetarians, for example, because it only takes one of them – in a family group that might also contain five hungry omnivores – to deprive the chain of six potential customers. “We call it the ‘mother segment’,” Wansink says. “The kids drive the initial desire to go to the restaurant, and then you have the apple and walnut salad, that mom can eat, so she doesn’t have a good reason not to eat there.”

Rule number one of business? Get the largest amount of profit from the smallest possible investment. It costs these places very little to put a salad on the menu. If that means that they can get an additional 5 sales on Soft Drinks and french fries per hour per restaurant, then that’s what they’re going to do.

Technorati Tags: Fast Food, Restaurants, Food Industry

Derrick recently pointed me to a new site called Rudd Sound Bites, the weblog of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University. On the site, there was a brief post about Burger King, and their penchant for being unapologetic for the fat content in their food.

Subsequently BK has added a Triple Whopper and BK stackers, which layer burgers, cheese, bacon, and sauce. The Quad Stacker has 4 hamburgers, 4 slices of cheese, 8 strips of bacon, and sauce weighing in 1000 calories, 68 grams of fat, 30 grams of saturated fat, 2 grams of trans fat, and 1800 mg of sodium (78% of a day’s total).

One wonders about the corporate wisdom of this strategy. BK might do well initially, but I believe is a sitting duck in the long-term. The company is probably more vulnerable to lawsuits and will lose ground with consumers (particularly the next generation – today’s children) who are becoming more nutrition conscious. These are exactly the traps several of the big investment banks have warned companies against in reports on the obesity problem. Looks like BK might be positioning itself to go down in flames.

Dr. Kelly Brownell is the author of the post, and I’m not sure I completely agree with his assessment of the situation. It’s my belief that by trumpeting the unhealthiness of their food by Burger King (and Hardee’s for that matter, where meat is a condiment) inoculates these companies from lawsuits. It’s not as if these restaurants are promoting these foods as healthy, when in fact they seem to be getting a fair amount of press on how unhealthy these products actually are. It’s going to be difficult to successfully sue Burger King or Hardee’s when they can provide ample evidence of these “negative” publicity articles.

Of course there’s ample room for distrust of the fast food industry. Thanks in large part to McDonald’s misguided idea that they can be all things to all people, and then Kentucky Fried Chicken’s fabricated claim that fried chicken is the “cornerstone of a healthy diet“, it’s easy to be concerned about their claims to health. But this? This is a different approach to selling their products. The press release states clearly:

“We’re satisfying the serious meat lovers by leaving off the produce and letting them decide exactly how much meat and cheese they can handle.”

That’s not subterfuge, that’s an invitation. While they are not coming out and saying that their BK Stacker is unhealthy, they certainly aren’t hiding the fact that this product is all bun, burger and cheese, and lots of it. If I go in and purchase this sandwich, how is Burger King liable?

As to the larger point of Dr. Brownell’s post, whether or not this strategy is good for the company long term (lawsuits aside), we’ll have to wait and see. My bet is that they’ll still be in a battle with Wendy’s for the number two position in the Fast Food hierarchy, and they’ll still show profits.

I, for one, am glad to see fast food restaurants being unapologetic for their products. By being clear on who they are and what they sell, it makes it easier for me to decide whether or not I visit their establishments. That I choose not to is worth noting, but only if you keep in mind that I don’t really fit into their core demographics.

Technorati Tags: Food, Fast+Food, Restaurants

Wendy’s, the fast food giant based out of Columbus, Ohio, is removing their “Biggie” designation from their drinks. Instead, they are going back to the “small”, “medium” and “large” options. From another article:

Wendy’s International Inc. research shows demand for big drinks, but people were confused by the designation of Biggie and Great Biggie, the former extra-large size, spokesman Denny Lynch said. Switching to a more straightforward small, medium and large sizes made sense, he said.

Instead, they are now re-sizing their drink sizes. A 20 ounce drink is a small, a 32 ounce drink is a medium and the new 42 ounce drink is a large.

I’m wondering if the guys at Wendy’s are perhaps overcompensating for some other shortcomings.

Technorati Tags: Wendy’s, Fast Food News, Drinks

These are the kind of stories I love, essentially because they prove that I can be right from time to time. Who doesn’t like feeling validated from time to time?

At any rate, McDonald’s has been rebounding from the market decline that the company took a year or two ago. The reason?

It’s not the sudden prevalence of healthy options on their menu. In fact, it’s the opposite. From the New York Times article:

McDonald’s has attracted considerable attention in the last few years for introducing to its menu healthy food items like salads and fruit. Yet its turnaround has come not from greater sales of healthy foods but from selling more fast-food basics, like double cheeseburgers and fried chicken sandwiches, from the Dollar Menu.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…Global Food industries cannot be all things to all people. McDonald’s cannot be viable option for those who eat healthy, because people who eat healthy rarely walk into fast food restaurants.

The article then goes on to mention the health concerns of fast food restaurants as well as how McDonald’s has targeted its marketing efforts on specific minorities.

The health concerns of fast food are undeniably valid, but if McDonald’s (and any fast food restaurant) would stop pretending to care about feeding healthy food to their customers, then they cease creating the untenable and nearly indefensible position of having to pretend they’re healthy while selling unhealthy foods. They make vast amounts of money selling hamburgers laden with cheese and potatoes deep fried in oil. No amount of pedometer giveaways and side salads is going to change that fact.

Instead, if they are open about their products and give the full nutritional information of their products, it puts a larger (if not nearly complete) responsibility on the customers for choosing to eat the double cheeseburgers and drinking the supersized soft drinks.

Or to put it another way, if a person has nearly 100% of the relevant information surrounding the product they buy, then they can hardly blame someone else if said product is bad for them.

However, if a company goes out of their way to provide dis-information, mis-information or hide information about the bad side of their products, they leave themselves liable for the actual information that they were trying to cover up.

The x factor here is how much does advertising affect people’s choice. That’s a topic I’ve tried to get my head around, but every time I feel I need to chase down advertising statistics, I end up smacking myself in the head repeatedly, in some sort of bizarre operant-conditioning preventative measure.

Technorati Tags: Fast Food, McDonald’s, Food