Why I Find McDonald's Rebranding Effort Disturbing

I don't eat at McDonalds, at least if I can help it.  However, this past year I've been inside several restaurants, and a trend I've observed from afar has become quite clear: McDonald is rebranding itself.

Under the fire of Supersize Me and a culture waking up to the fact that it is committing dietary suicide, McDonalds is changing. Gone is the option to buy fake sugar water by the half-gallon, the portions are downsized, salads have been added, and they have even moved to a smaller bag of fries and added fruit to their happy meals. Out are the garish yellow and red, and in are a full line of coffee drinks. McDonald is now healthier and grown-up.

While healthier food at the nations largest restaurant chain sounds like good news, I find it disturbing. McDonalds no longer looks like the monster it was five years ago, but portion size and menu variety are only a several of many problems with the industrial food system McDonalds typifies.

Below are some problems that risk being forgotten or obscured in a new, sleeker McDonalds:

• The problem never was that fast food chains didn't offer salads and fruits; the problem was that they made junk food very cheap. $1 double hamburgers are an ecological travesty and a nutritional disaster, and they're still on the menu. 
• The idea that now we can get "healthy" food quickly, cheaply, and effortlessly may be worse than the understanding that junk food is quick, cheap, and effortless. 
• What if McDonalds or some other chain could get the numbers right, and produce healthy, balanced meals? Nutritional engineering is an industrial solution to a problem caused mainly by the industrial system. A 2000 calorie diet with so many milligrams of this and that does little to help us understand the food on our dinner plates. It still leaves us disconnected from our food, from the people who produced it, from the processes it underwent, and from the land it grew upon. 
• The industrial machinery and efficiency that drives McDonalds opposes the communal function meals have traditionally held. 
• Toys, TVs, video games, and news papers in restaurants only nurture a culture of disintegrated consumers, at the dinner table and in the various realms of life. 
• Eating a salad that comes in plastic container, sitting inside a plastic bag, and accompanied with individually wrapped plastic utensils, plastic wrapped salad dressing, nuts, and croutons, and eaten with several paper napkins is environmentally irresponsible. 
• Fast foods corporations  may change their menu, but they are only partners in the crime. The American government subsidizes the production of junk food that hurts our youth population every day. This needs to stop.