It has probably been  about ten years since I ate a McDonalds meal, in the beginning it was probably some sort of youthful, No Logo inspired, idealism - probably reinforced by watching Super Size Me. I do vaguely remember quite enjoying eating BigMacs and especially enjoying their fries, but through a combination of the health implications and the globalisation/ethical concerns I stopped eating their food.

I now find myself ten years later, still not eating their food, and trying to come up with a rational explanation why. I’ve found that especially difficult, and I’m still not convinced that I’ve managed it.

The ethical concerns that I had are now not really an issue. Their produce, particularly the beef, now comes from within the country (at least in the UK), so rain forest slash and burn isn’t an issue. Their staff aren’t being ‘exploited’ they are all free to leave and go and work somewhere else or take benefits - so actually they have more options than if they didn’t work there.

The health concerns still seem valid, but given that I have a tendency to eat terrible food when I’m working hard, forget meals on a regular basis, and generally have a pretty horrific nutritional track record, I don’t see how eating an extra value meal once in a while could cause me any extra harm (it might even be better for me than eating a big bag of crisps instead of dinner).

Puya, one of my students at UTS, mentioned something in a blog post about social collapse that gave me a passable reason for my behaviour. In his presentation at the Global Catastrophic Risks conference, Robin Hanson mentioned the wisdom of stairs¹.

The main reason to be careful when you walk up a flight of stairs is not that you mightslip and have to retrace one step, but rather that the first slip might cause a second slip, and so on until you fall dozens of steps and break your neck

I suppose that my argument is that as I have a very addictive (but lazy) personality², I might  start eating at McDonalds and turn it into a habit. This seems to be a weak argument given my feelings about Starbucks (which I’ll probably write about soon too) but for now I’m going to play it safe just in case.