Shareholders Force McDonald's to Act on Pesticides

Feeling pressure from a coalition of shareholders, McDonald's has announced that it will examine the use of pesticides on the potatoes it purchases with an eye toward possibly reducing the use of noxious chemicals and making public information about the extent to which its potatoes are sprayed.

Under an agreement with the shareholder group--the Bard College Endowment, Newground Social Investment and the AFL-CIO Reserve Fund--McDonald's, the nation's largest purchaser of potatoes, will:

* survey its current U.S. potato suppliers

• compile a list of best practices in pesticide reduction that will be recommended to the company’s global suppliers (through the company’s Global Potato Board)

• communicate findings related to best practices to shareholders, as well as in the company’s annual corporate social responsibility report.

The three investor groups teamed with Investor Environmental Health Network to engage McDonald’s in talks about pesticide reduction. The shareholders said the company’s commitment will support progress on the pesticide issues that affect the environment, public health, and farm employees.

We say this is a good thing. A spud without chemicals is definitely a better spud. And we like the idea of shareholders mobilizing for food free of pesticides.

Unhealthiest City in America

According to the Associated Press, that honor would go to Huntington, West Virginia. There, the dining experience is ruled by hot dogs. Huntington leads the nation in heart disease and diabetes--as well as the number of elderly people who have lost all their teeth.

"A lot of the patients we were seeing were getting heart attacks in their 30s. They were requiring open heart surgery in their 30s. And we were concerned because it used to be you wouldn't see heart patients come in until they were in their 50s," said a nurse at the regional heart institute in Huntington.

Located in coal country near the Ohio River, Huntington is on the skids economically. People live on fast food. In fact, Kentucky Fried Chicken recently issued a challenge: see if you can spend $10 in a local supermarket and come up with a meal to beat the KFC 7-piece $9.99 "value meal."

There's a pizza joint on nearly every block in Huntington and it's rare to see a jogger or bicyclist on the streets. Said one local physician: "I don't know that I've ever been in a place where I've seen so many overweight people."

Read the whole story here.

Get Me My Whopper, Or I Will Keel You!

I was making client meals this afternoon with the New York Giants-Tampa Bay game playing on the tube in the background when this evil Burger King commercial caught my attention.

Have you seen it? Am I the last person on the planet to learn of this new low in hucksterism sullying the public airwaves?

The ad shows videos--Candid Camera-style--wherein Burger King customers have been slipped a competitor's burger instead of the Whopper they ordered. I don't think these greaseballs are acting. I think they are actual, paying diners caught in the act of becoming homicidally irate over the possibility of being denied their Whopper.

Have we really sunk this low?

What am I saying....Of course we've sunk this low.

Keep in mind, we are talking about a "sandwich" that delivers 600 industrially processed calories and 36 grams of artery-choking fat, nearly half the recommended daily dose. But some of these clowns may have actually ordered the Triple Whopper, which packs a liver-splitting 1,130 calories and 74 grams of fat.

It is indeed scary to see Americans working themselves into a slobbering, vein-popping frazzle when denied some of the most harmful, nutritionally bankrupt food on the planet. Even scarier: Burger King apparently is convinced that this approach will sell more Whoppers.

(Note to self: This is the same Burger King that refused to pay a 1-cent-per-pound raise to the cash-strapped workers who pick the Florida tomatoes that garnish those very same Whoppers.)