Friday, Jul 4, 2008
If McDonald's rapid response was a public relations move, it was also proof of lessons learned from previous health crises, such as the E. coli outbreak of 1982, when tainted beef at McDonald's restaurants caused outbreaks of the illness in Oregon and Michigan. According to author Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation," McDonald's kept mum about its role in the outbreak at the time. He notes that the closest the company came to acknowledging its role was the admission by a company spokesman of "the possibility of a statistical association between a small number of diarrhea cases in two small towns and our restaurants."
But as author Fox documented in her book "Spoiled," the company was the culprit in the outbreak. Years on, after the 1993 outbreak of E. coli at Jack in the Box restaurants in Seattle, the cumulative number of deaths in the U.S. relating to that beef-borne disease has been greater than the number of deaths attributed to mad cow disease in Europe. And yet, our confidence in beef here is nowhere near as shaken.
Fox says the E. coli outbreak did little to hurt the public perception of McDonald's. "Almost no one knows McDonald's was associated with E. coli. There were news reports in 1982 that lasted a day." But it did serve as a wake-up call, and Fox says the company moved quietly and quickly to eliminate the problem. "They were among the first to make certain that their meat met a bacterial standard. They instituted changes in the way they cooked beef that were extremely helpful in making certain that they didn't have problems with undercooked burgers. Other companies didn't follow suit fast enough," she says, pointing to the Jack in the Box catastrophe.
Fox believes fast-food hamburger became a significantly safer product as a result of the scares. "I always tell people that hamburgers from the fast-food places are probably safer than ones you make at home -- in terms of bacteria."
The proactive stateside move, made despite the fact that there has been no documented case of mad cow disease in the U.S., is indicative of a recent trend at McDonald's, which has changed its product and marketing practices in American and other markets as a result of health concerns and environmental controversies in Europe. The company's move to ban the purchase of genetically modified foods, like Monsanto New Leaf potatoes, for its french fries came as a result of fears that massive consumer protests in Europe, where the debate over biotechnology burns much hotter than here, might spread to the U.S. As a global company, it is able to detect problems with incredible speed and then make tweaks to the system in other countries to avoid the replication of controversies or risks that could adversely impact its market.
"McDonald's has a very good, strong management system," says Harvard's Watson, who edited the book "Golden Arches East: McDonald's in East Asia." "These people are very good and very responsive to global issues. It's characteristic for them to move rapidly, not only to respond to the genetically modified food fright in Britain. They were among the very first corporations to move in that direction. More recently, they were also among the first to reassure their clientele in Europe about the beef they provide."
Watson praises McDonald's swift and forthright response to BSE. "They've learned from the mistakes the British government made by trying to stonewall and trying to ignore it. They operate very quickly for the obvious reason that the managers in the European markets are local people."
Watson also sees a link here to globalism. "McDonald's and GMOs and the mad cow scare are all part of a package of how these issues have become global. Food is the next big global issue, and meat and the exchange of meat is what it's all going to be centered on. Mad cow disease is becoming a disease of global trade. Of course, the American Department of Agriculture and the cattle industry are working very hard to be certain it doesn't hit here," Watson says.
But are they doing enough? Though there has not been a single physical outbreak of mad cow disease in the United States, awareness of the lethal pathogen is growing as a result of increasing media scrutiny. "I don't think that most Americans think that mad cow disease is here or that foot-and-mouth disease is here, but they've begun to get a bit queasy," says Fox. "McDonald's is very aware that either one of these could come here. There's no fence around America that's going to keep them out. We have globalized trade, and trade is a pathway for pathogens. Every single day there are millions of things and people going in and out of this country. How long can we keep these illnesses out? The Europeans understand this better than we do."
Thanks to intensive industrial farming, Fox expects, "we're going to have more and more of these problems. Sometimes I feel like a hunter-gatherer trying to find something good to eat," she says.
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