In France, Of Course!
Bonjour! I have a confession to make. I haven’t eaten in a McDonald’s since I read this amazing and eye-opening book, Fast Food Nation, when I was in college about 4 or 5 years ago. So, I had no idea that McDonald’s had become so progressive and gay-friendly! They need to bring some of that attitude over to the States, however!
This French commercial of a father/son moment in a McDonald’s was oddly refreshing. Here he is, bonding with his dad in the restaurant, while talking secretly to his boyfriend on the phone. The exchange over the phone was sweet, understated and genuine. Then, as the father sits down, oblivious to the son’s romantic situation, you get this feeling that maybe the son is going to come out to his dad, in the McDonald’s, over some fries and ketchup. What an interesting premise for a commercial!
So, my question for McDonald’s is, now that I know that they don’t care about sexual orientation and will use any tactic to sell their burgers, why is it they are so afraid to put that kind of ad here in the States? We have this false idea that we always control what the media puts out there, but in actuality, (for better or worse) they lead the way on many of our collective values and beliefs in society.
If McDonald’s, one of the biggest and most successful corporations in the world, makes it okay for someone to “come as you are” to their place of business, it creates an underlying wave of unification and acceptance about one another’s differences. If those kinds of ads play on television, children and people of all ages see them. These positive images begin to subconsciously shape the minds and hearts of the youth, and if they see images of love and acceptance (even from a fast food commercial), I wouldn’t be surprised if the culture relaxed more as a whole about the idea of marriage equality and respecting one another’s personal lives and choices.
I’m not saying that I am eating at a McDonald’s anytime soon, unless they become a vegan establishment overnight, but I will say that my opinion of McDonald’s has improved after watching this clip. Who knows? Maybe this kind of inclusive advertising will actually catch on in what used to be the most forward thinking country in the world. We still have it inside of us. The ability to look beyond race, gender, sexual orientation and religion to see to the heart of people. Hey, if McDonald’s can do it, why can’t we?
Venez comme vous êtes!
Bonjour! I have a confession to make. I haven’t eaten in a McDonald’s since I read this amazing and eye-opening book, Fast Food Nation, when I was in college about 4 or 5 years ago. So, I had no idea that McDonald’s had become so progressive and gay-friendly! They need to bring some of that attitude over to the States, however!
This French commercial of a father/son moment in a McDonald’s was oddly refreshing. Here he is, bonding with his dad in the restaurant, while talking secretly to his boyfriend on the phone. The exchange over the phone was sweet, understated and genuine. Then, as the father sits down, oblivious to the son’s romantic situation, you get this feeling that maybe the son is going to come out to his dad, in the McDonald’s, over some fries and ketchup. What an interesting premise for a commercial!
So, my question for McDonald’s is, now that I know that they don’t care about sexual orientation and will use any tactic to sell their burgers, why is it they are so afraid to put that kind of ad here in the States? We have this false idea that we always control what the media puts out there, but in actuality, (for better or worse) they lead the way on many of our collective values and beliefs in society.
If McDonald’s, one of the biggest and most successful corporations in the world, makes it okay for someone to “come as you are” to their place of business, it creates an underlying wave of unification and acceptance about one another’s differences. If those kinds of ads play on television, children and people of all ages see them. These positive images begin to subconsciously shape the minds and hearts of the youth, and if they see images of love and acceptance (even from a fast food commercial), I wouldn’t be surprised if the culture relaxed more as a whole about the idea of marriage equality and respecting one another’s personal lives and choices.
I’m not saying that I am eating at a McDonald’s anytime soon, unless they become a vegan establishment overnight, but I will say that my opinion of McDonald’s has improved after watching this clip. Who knows? Maybe this kind of inclusive advertising will actually catch on in what used to be the most forward thinking country in the world. We still have it inside of us. The ability to look beyond race, gender, sexual orientation and religion to see to the heart of people. Hey, if McDonald’s can do it, why can’t we?
Venez comme vous êtes!
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Chris MacDonald
suburban white lady
angel triggs
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Graham Sale
Salon.com
Comments
Mayor McCheese for President!
Althpugh every food chain is represented theirs was by far the Ugly ?American screaming out LOOK AT ME!!!
Note: Quarter pounders are sold under a different name in France
but it won't stop there...
Wendy's, Carls Jr ... KFC, Taco Bell...
C'mon you OS writers, start pitchin your ad ideas to the fast food giants!!!
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Now if only they'd stop donating all their money to Republicans ....
On a similar Open Salon posting, M Todd writes:
"The blame is on the parents who give their kids unhealthy food. McDonalds would sell tofu if that is what the public wanted.
"Enough of this nanny state BS. McDonalds is listening to the market and that is good business."
Yes. McDonald's (which test-marketed a veggie burger in California several years ago) is merely giving the public what it thinks it wants.
Several years ago, a series of e-mail exchanges between animal activist Lauren Ornelas and John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, prompted Mackey to go vegan. He later commented in Veg-News that companies like Whole Foods can put vegan products on the market, but there needs to be an actual consumer demand for these products, if they are to succeed. That's capitalism.
(Mackey, a Libertarian-leaning entrepreneur, later incurred the wrath of the Left by expressing opposition to health care reform in the Wall Street Journal.)
To change things at the corporate level, we have to change things at the grassroots level: i.e., consumer demand. We have to educate the public.
In an opinion piece in the Animals' Agenda from the late '90s, Ingrid Newkirk, Executive Director of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), pointed out that meat and dairy alternatives, veggie burgers, soy "ice creams," etc. didn't magically appear on the marketplace, but were there as the result of consumer demand.
The following quotes, points, facts, figures, and statistics are excerpted from Please Don't Eat the Animals (2007) by Jennifer Horsman and Jaime Flowers:
"Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."
---Albert Einstein
"Each year, the meat industrial complex abuses and butchers nearly 9 billion cows, pigs, sheep, turkeys, chickens, and other innocent, feeling animals just for the enjoyment of consumers. Each year, nearly 1.5 million of these consumers are crippled and killed prematurely by heart failure, cancer, stroke, and other chronic diseases that have been linked conclusively with the consumption of these animals. Each year, millions of other animals are abused and sacrificed in a vain search for a 'magic pill' that would vanquish these largely self-inflicted diseases."
---Alex Hershaft, PhD, president, Farm Animal Reform Movement
When analyzing 8,300 deaths in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany among 76,000 men and women in five different, large studies, researchers concluded that vegetarians have a 24 percent reduction in death from heart disease.
Similarly, in the famous Oxford Vegetarian Study, where 6,000 vegetarians were compared with 5,000 meat-eaters over nearly two decades, scientists found that the rate of death from heart disease was 28 percent lower in vegetarians than in meat-eaters.
One study analyzed eighty scientific studies in leading medical journals. The analysis found that vegetarians had lower blood pressure, and were less likely to suffer from stroke, heart attack, and kidney failure.
A large German study of nearly 2,000 vegetarians found that deaths from heart disease were reduced by over one-third, and that heart disease itself was far less than that of the general population.
Another large study examined the coronary artery disease risk of young adults ages 18 to 30 and vegetarians were found to have much higher levels of cardiovascular fitness and a greatly reduced risk of heart disease.
"The process of gradual blocking of the coronary arteries begins not in adulthood but in childhood...and the main cause of this arteriosclerosis is the steadily increasing amount of fat in the American diet, particularly saturated animal fats such as those found in meat, chicken, milk and cheeses. If there was another disease that caused half a million deaths a year, you can be sure that the public would be acutely aware of the danger, and that the cure or prevention would be universally practiced."
---Dr. Benjamin Spock, author, child expert
"I don't understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open and put them on powerful cholesterol-lowering drugs for the rest of their lives."
---Dr. Dean Ornish, author, Reversing Heart Disease
Stroke is the third leading cause of death behind heart disease and cancer. Vegetarians have a 20 to 30 percent reduced risk of having a stroke. Stroke, like heart disease, is associated with diets high in saturated fats, and the vegetarian diet is naturally low in these fats.
The Oxford Vegetarian Study found cancer mortality to be 39 percent lower among vegetarians when compared with meat-eaters. The European Prospective Investigation of Cancer found vegetarians suffer 40 percent fewer cancers than the general population.
Studies have shown that decreasing a woman's animal fat intake can reduce the chances that she will die from breast cancer. A large-scale, long-term study in the Netherlands found a powerful connection between the amount of animal fat consumed and the rate of prostate cancer. A review of a dozen studies found dietary fat strongly correlated with prostate cancer.
Ovarian, uterine, and endometrial cancers have all been shown to be strongly correlated to the amount of animal fat in one's diet, and vegetarian women have significantly lower rates of these cancers.
"The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all the natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined."
---Dr. Neal Barnard, Executive Director, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine
"Vegetarians have the best diet. They have the lowest rate of coronary disease of any group in the country. They have a fraction of our heart attack rate and they have only 40 percent of our cancer rate."
---William Castelli, MD, Director, Framingham Heart Study
"Human beings are not natural carnivores. When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings..."
---Dr. William Roberts, editor-in-chief, American Journal of Cardiology
Linnaeus, who introduced binomial nomenclature (naming plants and animals according to their physical structure) wrote: "Man's structure, external and internal, compared with that of other animals shows that fruit and succulent vegetables constitute his natural food."
Predators exist in the wild, but that does not imply man must automatically imitate them. Cannibalism and rape also occur in nature. Robert Louis Stevenson, in his book In the South Seas, noted there was no difference between the "civilized" Europeans and the "savages" of the Cannibal Islands:
"We consume the carcasses of creatures with like appetites, passions, and organs as our own. We feed on babes, though not our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear."
Studies indicate flesh-eaters have less endurance than do vegetarians, while vegetarians have two to three times greater stamina and recover five times more quickly from exhaustion. Most kinds of cancer, as well as heart disease, osteoporosis, kidney disease, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, hemorrhoids, diverticulosis, arthritis, gallstones and gallbladder disease are all preventable and treatable on a vegetarian diet.
In a letter to a friend on the subject of vegetarianism, Albert Einstein wrote, "besides agreeing with your aims for aesthetic and moral reasons, it is my view that a vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind."
Additional data from Please Don't Eat the Animals:
Meat production causes deforestation, which then contributes to global warming. Trees convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, and the destruction of forests around the globe to make room for grazing cattle furthers the greenhouse effect. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations reports that the annual rate of tropical deforestation has increased from 9 million hectares in 1980 to 16.8 million hectares in 1990, and unfortunately, this destruction has accelerated since then. By 1994, a staggering 200 million hectares of rainforest had been destroyed in South America just for cattle.
Livestock production affects a startling 70 to 85 percent of the land area of the United States, United Kingdom, and the European Union. That includes the public and private rangeland used for grazing, as well as the land used to produce the crops that feed the animals. By comparison, urbanization only affects 3 percent of the United States land area, slightly larger for the European Union and the United Kingdom. Meat production consumes the world's land resources.
Half of all fresh water worldwide is used for thirsty livestock. Producing eight ounces of beef requires an unimaginable 25,000 liters of water, or the water necessary for one pound of steak equals the water consumption of the average household for a year.
The Worldwatch Institute estimates one pound of steak from a steer raised in a feedlot costs: five pounds of grain, a whopping 2,500 gallons of water, the energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline, and about 34 pounds of topsoil.
33 percent of our nation's raw materials and fossil fuels go into livestock destined for slaughter. In a vegan economy, only 2 percent of our resources will go to the production of food.
"It seems disingenuous for the intellectual elite of the first world to dwell on the subject of too many babies being born in the second- and third-world nations while virtually ignoring the overpopulation of cattle and the realities of a food chain that robs the poor of sustenance to feed the rich a steady diet of grain-fed meat."
---Jeremy Rifkin, pro-life AND pro-animal author, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture, and president of the Greenhouse Crisis Foundation
Les Brown of the Overseas Development Council calculates that if Americans reduced their meat consumption by only 10 percent per year, it would free at least 12 million tons of grain for human consumption--or enough to feed 60 million people.