When burned by fire, one establishes an association between fire and pain. If a puppy gives a kiss and cuddles, one creates a correlation between puppies and camaraderie. The McDonald’s Corporation is manipulating humans’ establishment of opinions based on associations by replacing the toy included in a McDonald’s Happy Meal with one of four paperback children stories to connect the company with education. In addition, McDonald’s interchanged the toys for the Happy Meal Books to create the impression that the food chain is shifting into a healthier food provider, when in reality it is serving unhealthy products. Furthermore, by associating the company with knowledge, McDonald’s is devaluing education.
In an attempt to link the company with education, McDonald’s distributed 20 million books across the U.S. between Nov. 1 and 14 to celebrate National Family Literacy. The corporation offered four titles including The Goat Who Ate Everything, Deana’s Big Dreams, Ant Can’t and Doddi the Dodo Goes to Orlando that each consist of a story that supports healthy eating and physical fitness. McDonald’s is exploiting the goodness of education by using it to promote the chain’s concerns of a healthy society. Meanwhile, in reality, a healthy society is not as important to the owners of McDonald’s as is the amount of money in their pockets.
“By associating the brand with a message of healthy eating, it’s tricking kids and parents into thinking that McDonald’s has their best interests in mind,” said Corporate Accountability International campaign director Sara Deon to ABC NEWS.
McDonald’s gave these books that promote the chain’s healthier options of non-fat chocolate milk and apple slices in an attempt to mask the harmfully unhealthy products that they are not striving to alter. Bonnie Taub-Dix is one of many U.S. residents who sees the need for the discontinuation of the production of these unhealthy foods. When the McDonald’s chain swapped the kid-loved toys found in Happy Meals for fables to teach healthy eating, the foundation did not increase the nutritional value of their Happy Meals, only the meals’ teaching value.
“What about a grilled chicken sandwich instead of fried nuggets?” said New York nutritionist and Bonnie Taub-Dix, author of Read it Before You Eat It to NBC NEWS. “There’s no grilled chicken sandwich for kids at McDonalds. And what about a fish sandwich that’s not breaded and fried with breading that’s thicker than the fish?”
As McDonald’s distributed these paperback books, the company took advantage of societal tendencies to assume that McDonald’s strengthened the quality of its food but in reality merely boosted the company’s reputation to increase the chains’ income.
