Et Tu, Ronald?

‘SOME things are even harder to swallow than defeat in court. And up there among the very trickiest is the rebranding of McDonald’s as a health food emporium.

McDonald’s new staff uniforn

But times do change and so it is that the firm that once gave us Ronald McDonald and indigestion now offers salads.

The story’s accompanying picture confirms that it is a salad. To our trained eye, the globs of red are not dollops of ketchup but tomatoes, while the green stuff is not mould but something called lettuce.

However, the Times comes not to praise the Caesar salad but to bury it. For a chicken Caesar salad with dressing and croutons contains 425 calories and 21.4g of fat.

These figures mean little at first glance, but their impact becomes clearer when readers then learn that a typical hamburger contains 253 calories and 7.7g of fat.

‘It’s the Italian cheese,’ says a spokesperson for the company, a woman with electric orange hair and wan complexion.

And she’s right. With the cheese removed, the salad does indeed lose some of its fattiness, in much the same way that removing the meat from between the two pieces of bread makes the burger less calorific.

And then if you throw away the bread and chuck the salad in a bin, a trip to McDonald’s need not be a fattening one.

And it gets still better if you walk to your nearest outlet, or, perhaps, even run…’

Posted: 9th, March 2004 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink