Introduction
Originally, "you've been misled" stood for the fact that I was getting a lot of hits on this webpage of people claiming that they got sent here via a search for the Yellow Ribbon Campaign. Of course I didn't have any information on this topic in my webpage, so they were quite upset. It originally was a website dedicated to stopping the name "Spam" being used as the name for mass e-mails. Then it turned into an anti-McDonalds site for one and a half years until now (1/24/02) when I decided to make it more professional, gather my information and sources and try to convey my message in the best way possible. Now "you've been misled" stands for the fact that McDonalds hides this it so well that many people are not even aware of it.
First of all, this site will remain to be one in which I explain my disdain and contempt for the fast food industry - in particular, McDonalds. It came to my attention in my sophomore year of high school that McDonalds was, in part, responsible for the destruction of the rainforests. After I did some research and found out a few rather disturbing points, I started avoiding eating at McDonalds altogether. Most of the following facts have been collected by me from various sources in my senior-year term paper entitled "What's wrong with McDonalds?" Indeed, what is wrong with McDonalds?
How the rainforest is destroyed
It's a simple concept really.
McDonalds sells beef. Many beef suppliers get their beef from Central and South American countries. These cattle farms are usually placed on rainforest land that had been cut and cleared. The poor soil of the rainforest can only sustain life (grain for the cattle to fed upon) for up to a decade (although the mean is 2 years). The beef suppliers must move their farms every few years and consequently destroy more rainforest. Rarely does the forest regrow, even if replanted (which is even more rare). 70% of the moisture that makes a rainforest a "rain"forest originates from the transpiration of the leaves on the vegetation. Once that vegetation is removed for a few years and then replaced when its bovine purpose is complete, the species of the rainforest cannot reestablish themselves because of the now lack of moisture they need to survive.
Using cleared rainforest land for cattle grazing is short lived; no land is more ill-suited to extensive livestock production. Trees serve as vital links in the water and nutrient cycles of the rainforest, absorbing most of the rainfall. When tree cover is removed, the underlying soil is no longer protected from the pounding rain and it rapidly loses important nutrients. Grass for cows does not grow on this land for long and is quickly replaced by weeds and shrubs. Silt from the eroded lands washed into oceans, where it buries and kills coral reefs. Most pasture obtained by way of rainforest destruction is abandoned within a decade of its first use for land newly carved from the forest (Sheth 220).
For minimal returns, ranchers and meat consumers alike sacrifice a huge treasure of biological diversity. Although tropical rainforests cover only seven percent of the earth's surface, they are home to over 50% of the earth's species. Biologists Christopher Uhl and Geoffery Parker have calculated that each hamburger produced from rainforest land consumes 55 square feet of the forest (Uhl 642). For each of the past 25 years that Central American has been deforested to make room for cattle, a thousand species have been forced into extinction (Robbins 365). A large portion of the beef raised in Costa Rica, Brazil, and other Latin American countries is exported to the United States (Uhl 642). The imported beef is cheaper and leaner than what is produced domestically, but it also attributes to the destruction of one of the last biologically diverse natural wonders on the planet.
Other Natural Resources
Water is another natural resource increasingly threatened by animal agriculture. Just to grow the grain needed to feed the livestock raised in factory farms, ranchers in California use one-third of all water consumed in the state. When all steps to the animal agriculture are considered, the process ends up taking one out of every two gallons of water used in the United States (Lappe 76). Domestic uses account for less than five percent. In a special issue on water, William Graves, editor of National Geographic, observed that it can take 1,000 gallons of fresh water to produce one eight ounce steak (Graves 1). Although it would take many showers for the average person to use 1,000 gallons of water, he or she would only have to eat a half dozen hamburgers to use the same amount.
Energy Efficiency
The energy efficiency of food can be calculated by dividing the calorie energy obtained from the food by the fossil fuel energy required to grow or raise it. A high number indicates an energy efficient food, while a number less than one means that more energy is put in than actually received. Some examples of plan foods range from 1.4 for peanuts to 6.4 for alfalfa. All plan foods have an efficiency greater than one; they give more energy than is invested in producing them.
On the contrary, representatives from the animal food group range from .045 for chicken to .01 for beef. Even the least energy-efficient plant food, peanuts, is 30 times more efficient than chicken, the most energy-efficient animal food.
Grain Statistics
In order to raise enough meat to satisfy the appetites of the world's meat eaters, a great deal of grain must be produced. In the United States, animals raised for meat consume 70% of the grain, 80% of the corn, and 90% of the soybeans grown domestically (Durning 70). Globally, around 40% of the world's grain is fed to livestock. Most of this usage, 0r 83% the world total, is concentrated in industrial countries (Alexandratos 83).
Poverty and Starvation
Currently 22% of Mexico's people go hungry, while livestock consume 30% of the country's grain (Barkin 35). While huge amounts of grain continue to be fed to animals, over 75% of the human population can barely feed itself. Almost 500 million people are severely malnourished and 15 million children die each year from starvation and related illness, 41,000 daily (Freeman 15).
Even a slight decline in meat consumption could help relieve pressures on the earth's agricultural ecosystem. When someone eating a regular North American diet converts to vegetarianism, they free up enough land to feed 10 other people in plant-food diets. If everyone in the world lived on a vegetarian diet, the earth's available farmland could feed 15 billion people (Sheth 92).
Health Problems
Heart disease, killer of one in three Americans, is caused by fatty build-up and blockage in arteries. Because meat is heavily laden with saturated animal fat, it is a major cause of this fat build-up, while fruits and vegetables are high in fiber and low in fat, both helping to reduce build-ups. In a twenty year study at Loma Linda University it was found that for men between the ages of 45 and 64, being a vegetarian reduced the risk of heart disease by 60% (Fonnebo 157).
As a seller of these fatty foods, McDonalds has claimed in its Nutrition Guide that, "...every time you eat at McDonald's, you'll eat good nutritious food." According to some McDonald's executives, however, nutritious simply meant that the food people ate contained nutrients - as does all food everywhere. Through clever advertising, McDonalds has once again pulled the wool over our eyes.
Other health risks include the potentially carcinogenic dyes and additives inserted into meat during production. The synthetic additives sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate are used to preserve all cured meats. The nitrites and nitrates impede spoilage and inhibit bacterial growth. They also give meat the red coloring and the flavoring to which people are accustomed. The additives are, of course, ingested with the food which travels to the stomach. Once there, the nitrites and nitrates are converted into nitrosamines, which have caused cancer in laboratory animals and are also believed to cause cancer in humans (Perl 53).
McLibel Trial
In 1986 all of this information seemed extremely relevant to the London Greenpeace who issued a leaflet entitled "What's Wrong With McDonald's?" Every member of the organization that handed out the leaflets in front of the stores believed each word of it completely. The libelous leaflet accused McDonald's of mistreating their employees; tempting their customers with food too high in fat, sugar, and salt, which could be linked to cancer and heart disease; causing starvation in the Third World; destroying the rainforest; knowingly exposing their customers to food poisoning; exploiting children through company advertisements; and mistreating animals (Guttenplan 6). Ultimately McDonald's sued five members of the London Greenpeace. McDonald's was definitely taking advantage of England's lopsided libel laws, which makes it all too easy for the powerful to gag their critics. The five either had to apologize or face a long hard trial where they would have to prove every statement in the leaflet to be correct. Three of the five chose to publicly apologize.
Helen Steel and Dave Morris were the two left standing. They refused to apologize. As Helen explained it, "It just really stuck in the throat to apologize to McDonald's. I thought it was them that should have been apologizing to ... society for the damage they do to society and the environment" (McLibel 1). Denied legal aid, they represented themselves. Denied trial by jury after McDonald's lawyers argued that the issues were too complicated for ordinary people to understand, Morris, a 43-year-old unemployed postal worker, and Steel, 31, a part-time barmaid, stood against one of the largest, most powerful corporations there is.
There should have been no contest. On one side of the libel case (often called McLibel) was a $32 billion-a-year corporation and a squad of London's most expensive lawyers. On the other side stood a pair of activists with a combined income of $12,000 a year. But the two got through twenty-eight pre-trial hearings, 313 days of evidence and submissions stretched over three years, 18,000 pages of transcripts, and 40,000 pages of documents and witness statements. Ultimately, this seemingly easy battle for McDonald's became England's longest trial of any kind (Vidal V).
After Steel and Morris finished up with their twenty day plus closing statements, it was time for the judge's decision. The judge, with his first libel case ever, was described as one of the most patient and even-handed men in the world. His decision was no different. Mr. Justice Bell entered the court calmly and rendered his decision. He explained that the defendants had proven that McDonald's exploits children, is responsible for the cruelty shown to their livestock, and is helping to depress wages in Britain. However, Justice Bell revealed that the defendants did not prove that McDonald's was responsible for the destruction of the rainforest or starvation in the Third World. They also had not proven that McDonald's is to blame for serving up unhealthy food that might cause fatal disease.
After all was said and done, Steel and Morris were required to pay McDonald's $98,000 in damages. But this was hardly enough to fix the public relations damage done to McDonald's during the trial. This was hardly a victory for McDonald's. For one thing, there was no direction to reimburse McDonald's for its legal costs, estimated as high as $20 million. And for another, the trial was a public relations nightmare with ex-employees and company officers revealing a myriad of details about restaurant cleanliness, corporate promotion, staff relations, and clandestine spying. D.D. Gutenplan called this trial, "part anatomy of a corporation and part theatre of the absurd" (Guttenplan 1). He is absolutely correct in analyzing it that way.
If the verdict of McLibel itself offers little comfort, the campaign it sparked has grown in fascinating directions. A week after the verdict was announced, 400,000 new copies of the leaflet was printed and were being handed out by none other than Dave Morris and Helen Steel. In addition, within hours the judges decision was posted on McSpotlight, to be linked with more than 100 megabytes of material including the banned leaflet (in 17 languages), a complete indexed transcript of the trial, and nearly every film clip, cartoon, or article McDonald's ever tried to suppress. And since McSpotlight.org is based in Holland it is beyond the reach of British libel laws.
Even though Helen and Dave did not prove everything necessary in the eyes of British law, what they did prove is vital to understanding the concepts of McDonaldization and the slow food movement. Also, their efforts in providing information about the other allegations may allow some people who read it to make their own judgment on whether or not McDonald's is responsible for destroying the rainforests or deteriorating personal and societal health. Regarding personal health, be careful of what you eat. As Henry Miller says, "Americans will eat garbage, provided you sprinkle it liberally with ketchup" (Vidal 103).
Random Facts
Forests offer stimulants, tranquilizers, contraceptives (like "the pill", which gets its active ingredient from the Mexican forest yam), and perhaps someday soon, a cure for AIDS. (In 1987, researchers found a tree compound from the Malaysian rain forest that was 100% effective against the HIV-1 virus. Sadly, scientists were never able to find that tree again.)
780 tree species have been found in a 25 acre plot of Malaysian rain forest -- more than the total number of tree species native to the US and Canada.
We're losing 33.8 million acres of tropical forest per year -- More than the total area of New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey and Delaware combined -- 2.8 million acres lost per month...93,000 acres/day...3,800 acres/hour...64 acres/minute. You do the math.
Of the 3,000 plants that have anti-cancer properties, 70% grow in rain forests.
About 6 species go extinct *every hour.*
One more fact: Out of those 144 species gone extinct everyday, one of them is from Hawaii. (Just to make it seem a little closer to home.)
Works Cited
Boyden, Stephen. Western Civilization in Biological
Perspective: Patterns in Biohistory. Oxford:
Claredon Press, 1987.
Fonnebo, V. "Mortality in Norwegian Seventh-Day
Adventists 1962-1986." Journal of Clinical
Epidemiology (1992) 157-167.
Graves, William. "When the well’s dry, we know the
worth of the water," National Geographic (November
1993), 1.
Guttenplan, D.D. "McJustice in Britain." The Nation. 14 July 1997: 6-7.
Lappe, Frances Moore. Diet for a Small Planet, Tenth
Edition. New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1982.
Perl, Lila. Junk Food, Fast Food, Health Food. New York: Houghton Mifflin/Clarion
Books, 1980.
Sheth, Tarang and Tej Sheth. Why Be a Vegetarian?
Fremont, CA: Jain Publishing, 1995.
Uhl, Christopher and Geoffery Parker, "Our Steak in
the Jungle," BioScience 36(10), 642.
Vidal, John. McLibel. New York: The New Press. 1997.
That's all. I hope that you now understand the consequences of using rainforest beef and the impact it can have on the environment. I hope you leave here being a more educated, environmentally sound person.
Here's where you can give me feedback. Anything from the amount of animals gone extinct from your birth to comments, critiques, or criticisms - I reply to all. Please take the time to do this. :)
