McDonald - The Arthur Page Society

including: paying low employee wages and providing poor working conditions, resisting
unionization attempts, encouraging low farm labor wages, enabling (albeit passively)
cruelty to animals through its reliance on so-called factory farms that mass-produce meat
and poultry, and providing unhealthy food high in fat and sugar. The first major attack
on McDonald’s came from a Greenpeace activist group in England in a pamphlet titled,
“What’s Wrong with McDonald’s? What They Don’t Want You to Know.” Labeled as
libelous by McDonald’s, a major court case against two of the protestors turned into a
classic David-and-Goliath struggle in which McDonald’s was cast at the corporate bully.
Even though the final judgment in the case favored McDonald’s, its reputation suffered
internationally, precipitating the first institutional acknowledgement of a link between the
type of food McDonald’s served and heart disease in the form of the ruling made by an
English appellate court. 34 The publicity was persistently negative and globally pervasive,
with McDonald’s cast, for the first time, as a transnational villain. The stage was set for a
long and ugly battle on the issue of fast food, nutrition, and health.
1.5 The Health and Nutrition Movement Gains Momentum: Late 1990s -2003
The success and ubiquity of the fast food industry catapulted it into the
increasingly prominent public health issue of nutrition and obesity in the developed
world. In the new millennium, McDonald's remains the world’s most recognized brand
—more so than the Coca-Cola . 35 While cookie, candy, and ice cream manufacturing
companies are ostensibly all in the business of producing food with questionable
nutritional value, advocacy groups focused on nutrition and obesity concerns are much
more interested in challenging the major fast food players. By the mid-2000s, one in four
Americans visited a fast food restaurant every day and spent more than ever. While
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