Bun Fight
Originally published in Black+White
As silver jubilees go, this one was something of a fizzer. In the 50 years since former milkshake-mixer salesman Ray Kroc had witnessed the future flipping on a sizzling hot San Bernardino grill, the company had never met anything quite so thorny as these two activists that now seemed permanently embedded in their side.
For the figures standing outside the McDonald’s store in Central London where their journey has began some two decades earlier, 2005 had finally brought vindication. After 20 long years grilling the burger giant. Helen Steel, a trained electrician, bar-worker and former gardener, and Dave Morris, an unemployed single father and former postman, had just pulled off what has been called the greatest legal and public relations victory against corporate power in living memory.
When McDonald’s first set their clownish eyes on the gardener and the postman, shiny new golden arches were towering over street corners in Thailand, Luxembourg, Bermuda, Venezuela, Italy, Mexico, and Aruba. McBlimp, the world’s largest airship, was flying high over New York City. The counters beneath the arches marked off 55 billion served. Ronald McDonald was more recognisable than Father Christmas.
In 1985, Britain was rumbling with political discontent. Margaret Thatcher was at the height of her powers, the Falklands were not yet forgotten, and the miners were just going back to work after the violent strikes of the past year. Morris was among a group of about 20 activists with London Greenpeace (no relation to the international organisation) who were looking to address growing concern with exploitation of people and planet by multinational corporations.
The two maintain that the real target was never McDonald’s itself. It is the system that is sick, explains Morris on the line from his home in Tottenham, North London:
“London Greenpeace brought together the views of a whole range of different movements that weren’t necessarily working together-the labour movement, environmentalists, animal welfare campaigners, nutritionists—in one leaflet focussing on McDonald’s as a symbol, not just calling for reforms of McDonald’s but as a symbol of a wider system, McWorld, and what it’s doing to our lives and our planet.”
The six-page leaflet, What’s Wrong With McDonald’s?, seemed harmless enough. It was rather poorly written and made claims that many would say were nothing new. Amongst other points, it stated that junk food makes you fat and may cause heart disease, that their advertising exploited children, that beef was sourced from cruel slaughterhouses, packaging caused litter and damage to the environment and that staff suffered from low wages and a lack of unionisation. It was produced to coincide with an international day of action against the company in October.