Or as one former dean of the Hamburger University where McDonald’s trains its senior staff put it: It gets so your blood turns

Or, as one former dean of the Hamburger University, where McDonald’s trains its senior staff, put it: “It gets so your blood turns to ketchup.”The McLibel Two and their supporters say that the logic symbolised by multinationals such as McDonald’s has imprisoned society in an “iron cage of rationality”. McDonald’s food may not taste good but wherever you eat it, it is no better or worse than it is anywhere else. To enhance predictability, McDonald’s aims to have total control over everything it does. Only then can the company enforce its rigid, profit enhancing system.

Every unit of input, whether its the number of steps a burger-flipper takes across the kitchen floor, or the number of dollops of ketchup on a burger, is checked and rechecked.At McDonald’s, predictability marches hand in hand with efficiency. The company has become “environmental enemy number one”, in the eyes of many, for the same reasons it has become such a commercial success.McDonald’s is founded on four core values: efficiency, calculability, predictability and control Everything the company does is designed to maximise profit. When McLibel reached the High Court in June 1994, construction companies were engaged in “the biggest road building programme since the Romans left”, a handful of campaigners were struggling to stop the veal calf trade and Shell was planning to dump the Brent Spar in the North Atlantic. And when McDonald’s finished its summing-up last December, the road-building programme was in tatters, the veal calf trade had been destroyed and Shell had been humbled by Greenpeace.As well as mirroring the growth in the green movement, McLibel has become one of its main rallying cries. The seemingly endless trial has explored the inner workings of one of the world’s most high profile multinationals.

It has seen an explosion in green activism across the country.When McDonald’s issued the writs in 1990, Swampy was doing his GCSEs, Twyford Down was one of southern England’s most treasured beauty spots and few people had even heard of the veal trade. The allegations and counter-claims have been aired in the High Court over 30 months and have been supported by nearly 40,000 pages of evidence. The factsheet accused McDonald’s of producing food linked to heart disease, diabetes and cancer and of abusing animals, its workers and the environment McDonald’s claims it is libellous. The “McLibel Two”, Helen Steel and Dave Morris, say the allegations are true. All this would make Ronald McDonald beam with pleasure were it not for one small thing – McLibel – the longest trial in history. McLibel, the judgment on which will be handed down today, started out as a seemingly pre-ordained contest between two unemployed environmentalists from north London and the world’s most powerful burger chain.
The bizarre trial focused on the contents of a “factsheet” produced by a group of green activists in the mid-1980s. Throughout today, like every other day, a new McDonald’s restaurant will open every three hours somewhere on the planet.