The man who ate McDonald’s

When Morgan Spurlock stuffed himself with junk food until his
doctors begged him to stop, he threw an industry into a
super-size crisis. Now a fierce corporate counter-attack has
begun.

By Andrew Gumbel

A few days into his grand experiment of eating all
McDonald’s, all the time, for 30 days straight, the New York
film-maker Morgan Spurlock started complaining of headaches
and other unpleasant side-effects: listlessness, depression,
chest pains, shortness of breath, sexual dysfunction and
more. His headaches, however, almost certainly pale in
comparison to the giant, throbbing one his much-discussed
documentary Super Size Me is causing the executives who run
Ronald McDonald’s global empire.

More than five weeks after it was released in the United
States, the film is playing on more screens than ever - 230
nationally and expanding every week - and has racked up more
than $7.5m (£4m) in domestic box office receipts, more
than100 times more than it cost to make.

Instead of suffering the usual fate of documentaries - a limp
roll-out in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, followed
by oblivion and late-night television reruns - Super Size Me
is showing every sign of being a bona fide hit, especially
with teenagers, the very demographic so hotly sought out by
McDonald’s marketing managers.

Every night, audiences are confronted with the sight of
Spurlock’s alarmingly deteriorating health as he shovels one
McDonald’s meal into his mouth after another. He eats
McDonald’s for breakfast, lunch and dinner, vowing to try
everything on the menu at least once in the course of his
experiment, minimizing his physical exercise (in keeping with
the relative immobility of the average American) and agreeing
that he will "super size" the portions he orders whenever the
server suggests it to him (again, in accordance with the
proclivities of regular fast-food customers).

For the final 15 minutes of the screening I attended earlier
this week, film-goers revolted by the sight of one too many
Egg McMuffins and super-sized side orders of fries were
groaning and writhing in their seats. A food industry
lobbyist who defended McDonald’s was booed when he made the
last of several appearances on screen.

By this point, Spurlock was being told by his doctors that
his cholesterol was shooting off the charts, his liver was
turning to paté and he risked meeting the same terminally
self-destructive fate as Nicolas Cage’s alcoholic protagonist
in Leaving Las Vegas. The damage was far beyond anything
Spurlock’s trio of specialists had imagined possible, and
they begged him (in vain) to abandon his stunt.

To say this is a public relations disaster for McDonald’s is
a gross understatement. It is a nightmare that shows no signs
of ending. Spurlock has - almost literally - regurgitated the
contents of his high-fat, high-sugar diet on to the
collective desks of McDonald’s management, and they appear to
be at a loss as to what to do about it.

For the first five weeks, they restricted their responses to
little more than a generic observation that overeating is bad
on any diet. No doubt they reasoned that kicking up a bigger
fuss would generate further publicity for the movie. But that
hush-hush strategy clearly has not worked, and the company
has now begun to fight back in more vigorous fashion. The
chosen battleground is not the US but Australia, where Super
Size Me was released earlier this month and broke national
box office records with its opening weekend receipts.

"If someone from America produces a film, and then comes out
to Australia and attacks us, I’m not going to take that
sitting down," the chief executive of McDonald’s Australia,
Guy Russo, said earlier this week.

Mr Russo has himself taken the leading role in a series of
television advertisements in which he tackles Spurlock head
on and calls him "stupid" for eating a solid junk food diet
for 30 days in a row. In a flurry of newspaper and television
interviews, Mr Russo has explained how he was enraged on
seeing the film earlier this month.

"No one eats McDonald’s food three times a day, every day,
and no one should," he told the Melbourne newspaper The Age.
(He himself says he eats his own company’s meals at least
three times a week, and has done for the past 30 years.) "We
believe, and have always believed, that McDonald’s can be
eaten as part of a well-balanced diet. What Mr Spurlock set
out to do, which was to double his daily calorie intake,
deliberately not exercise and over-eat, was totally
irresponsible."

In an offensive predicated on charm as well as full-frontal
attack, Mr Russo has also argued that McDonald’s takes the
issue of obesity very seriously, having introduced salads,
low-fat breakfasts and nutritional labeling in the past 18
months.

To date, McDonald’s has not challenged the factual content of
Super Size Me, only its point of view and interpretation. But
that, too, could be about to change, after Mr Russo
complained in an interview with Sky TV that Spurlock was
"providing false claims to Australians".

He did not spell out what those false claims might be, and
both Spurlock and the film’s Australian publicists have taken
great pleasure in pointing out that Mr Russo’s opinions on
the point appear to have undergone a radical change. "Less
than two weeks ago when I was in Brisbane," Spurlock shot
back a few days ago, "he and I did an interview together on a
radio station where he said the movie was important because
it highlighted the obesity epidemic."

Whatever the rights and wrongs of these points of view, it is
clear that a propaganda war is in progress, and that
something made Mr Russo decide that playing nice wasn’t
working. But playing nasty is having boomerang effects of its
own.

The Australian distributor, Dendy Films, reacted to the
McDonald’s television advertising campaign by claiming that
cinema managers were having to spend longer cleaning up
auditoriums where Super Size Me has been showing because
people alarmed by the dangers of bad eating presented on
screen were leaving behind full cartons of popcorn and soda
cups. In a less contentious climate, it is probably not
something it would have bothered to put out in a press
release. Dendy also offered a free ticket to the film for any
employee of McDonald’s Australia. Spurlock, meanwhile, has
taken issue with Mr Russo’s nutrition labeling claims, saying
that the posted signs at point of purchase - which Mr Russo
said were his "commitment" in the interview they did together
– were not evident in most Australian outlets of McDonald’s.

>From the fast-food industry’s point of view, there was

probably never going to be a good time for a film like Super
Size Me. It has hit McDonald’s not quite at the worst time -
that would have been 18 months ago, when the company posted
its first ever quarterly loss and its share price lost three-
quarters of its value - but at something very close to it.

When Super Size Me had its debut in January at the Sundance
Film Festival, where it picked up an award for documentary
directing, McDonald’s had just pulled itself out of a hole
caused by over-aggressive expansion, growing complaints about
customer service, concerns about obesity, a volley of
lawsuits filed against the fast-food industry and - to cap it
all - fears of mad cow disease.

The company had already recognized it needed to do something
about the health liability of its products. In addition to
the salads and yogurt breakfasts introduced in Australia and
elsewhere, it added low-fat milk and sliced fresh apples to
its menus in the US, the UK and elsewhere. The revamp worked,
at least financially, and soon McDonald’s executives were
hailing their turnaround hero, the chief executive, Jim
Cantalupo, as a visionary and genius on a par with the
company’s founder, Ray Kroc. Or they did until Mr Cantalupo
dropped dead of a heart attack in April - hardly the best
publicity for a fast-food company on a health kick.

One of the most galling aspects of Super Size Me, from the
company’s viewpoint, must have been its illustration of the
calorie and sugar content of even these new "healthy" items.
The film demonstrates - using McDonald’s own nutritional data
– that some of the salad dressings are as bad as anything
else on the menu. The Caesar salad with chicken première, for
example, contains more fat than a cheeseburger.

Remarkably, just six weeks after Sundance, McDonald’s
announced that the super-sizing that Spurlock reacts to so
vehemently in the film (his first encounter with a mega-
portion of fries and Coke ends up on the asphalt of the
drive-through parking lot, along with a double quarter
pounder he couldn’t quite bring himself to finish) was to be
phased out by the end of this year. Even more remarkably, the
company insisted the decision had nothing to do with the
film, but had been under consideration for several months.

Another McDonald’s announcement came on the very eve of Super
Size Me’s US release on 6 May: the introduction of the "Go
Active Happy Meal", complete with salad, free exercise manual
and a Stepometer for customers to monitor their daily walking
regime. Again, the company insisted the timing was a
coincidence.

Not everyone in the food industry has responded so bashfully.
Even before the Australian counter-attack, an outfit called
the American Council on Science and Health started ripping
into Super Size Me in a series of press releases, op-ed
pieces and capsule opinions offered by purported dietary and
health experts. Another organization, called Tech Central
Station, offered itself as a clearing house of opinion and
factual evidence, condemning Spurlock’s film as a scurrilous,
misleading, "disgusting", "dangerous" and "dishonest" piece
of work.

The American Council on Science and Health has not publicly
disclosed its corporate donors since 1991, but in the past
they have included crisp manufacturers, chocolate
manufacturers, Burger King and Coca Cola (a business partner
of McDonald’s). Tech Central Station, meanwhile, is backed by
the oil giant ExxonMobil, General Motors and, yes,
McDonald’s.

One op-ed piece, by the food industry lobbyist Jim Glassman,
made its way into a couple of US papers, including the St
Louis Post Dispatch, which apologized after it discovered his
direct links to McDonald’s.

But the counter-spinning goes on. One documentary maker, Soso
Whaley, has filmed her own 30-day McDonald’s diet and claims
it did her no harm whatsoever. Her corporate backers: Philip
Morris, the tobacco company, ExxonMobil and Coca Cola.

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