This idea that McDonald’s is a bad corporate citizen for selling the same things one can buy in a local grocery store is utter nonsense. That somehow a global corporation that sells junk food is wrong. Nobody should eat McDonald’s everyday, but you shouldn’t bake a cake everyday either.
“Jose Bove and a handful of terrorists are more interested in using McDonald’s as a convenient symbol than in understanding the facts behind our business,” said Greenberg.
More disturbing to Greenberg is the constant myth that McDonald’s is responsible for the deforestation of rain forests throughout the world to make way for raising cattle. To which he says that, “We’ve never bought cattle that were raised even close to a rain forest. We’ve had that policy for 13 years.”
“Not only is the specific rain forest charge not true, but our environmental record is generally very good,” said Greenberg.
Since 1993, McDonald's has partnered with Conservation International (CI) and Clemson University to help restore and protect 2.7 million degraded acres of rain forest land in La Amistad Biosphere Reserve, on the Costa Rica/Panama border.
In fact the corporation is a favorite example of waste reduction by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). "McDonald's led the way again in 1999 in promoting the "buy recycled" message by purchasing more than $300 million worth of products made from recycled materials," said Elizabeth Cotsworth, Director for the U.S. EPA Office of Solid Waste.
Another pop-culture benefit from McDonald’s has been courtesy of Thomas L. Friedman whose 1999 book The Lexus and The Olive Tree has been the virtual text book for the pro-globalization movement. In one chapter, he outlines a phenomenon he discovered while eating at McDonald’s throughout the world.
His Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, “stipulated that when a country reached the level of economic development where it had a middle class big enough to support a McDonald’s, it became a McDonald’s country,” wrote Friedman. “And people in McDonald’s countries didn’t like to fight wars anymore, they preferred to wait in line for burgers.”
In essence the power of Big Macs and IMacs make it more difficult for nations to go to war-the burger like the pen before it is mightier than the sword. It is a metaphor for what globalization is all about and about the constraints it places on foreign policy.
