I had scribbled a few notes to write a post about the ironies of the new Chicken Parmesana Wrap offered at McDonald’s and the origins of the Slow Food movement this week. Then I read on Mark Bittman’s Blog today that the McDonald’s in Italy are going to have a couple offerings using local produce, meat and regional flavors as a “test” for the next couple months. There will be two burgers; one with artichoke spread, asiago cheese and lettuce, the other with Italian olive oil, onions and pancetta. A third offering will be a salad comprised of lettuce, bresaola and parmesan.
Sounds tasty, but now I’m not really sure where to start. At the beginning, I guess. It is 1986 and the world is a much different place! The McDonald’s corporation decides to open up its first location in Italy, in a high profile tourist location near the Spanish Steps in Rome. From a philosophical standpoint, as far as food goes, McDonald’s and Italy are diametrically opposed. McDonald’s is all about pushing out congruent symbols of their brand the world over, hundreds of billions of uniformly processed burgers that are all exactly the same in every conceivable aspect.
Italy is the opposite of this. Italy is the antithesis of globalized and homogeneous food, proudly and fiercely defensive of regional cuisine and produce. So naturally, when this new McDonald’s was first proposed, there was some opposition to this idea; enough opposition that spawned the Slow Food movement in response. Slow Food would go on to be an anti-fast food (among other things) coalition that has expanded to 132 countries today.
I held this romanticized notion of Italy in my head from this story, where Italians actually boycotted this first McDonald’s into extinction and the corporation had yet to take ground in the country. However, it simply isn’t true. The flagship location by the Spanish Steps still stands, along with several hundred other locations throughout Italy. Several hundred locations over twenty-some years might be slow expansion for McDonald’s, but it’s certainly not a win for “slow food”.
McDonald’s has no doubt been successful putting regional twists on its menu for other areas of the globe. The recently developed veggie burger for McIndia, for a population that mostly vetoes beef or pork, is a good example. Whether or not the McItaly plan turns out to be a profitable venture should be conclusive in the next couple of weeks. It seems likely.
Italy’s agricultural minister is backing the idea, no doubt because it would provide a surge in sales of Italy’s food products. The quotes from the newspapers are curious though, boasting that this venture will help introduce regional Italian flavors to the new generation of Italians. That seems absurd. If the new generation of Italian’s are going to be learning about Italian food through McDonald’s and not through their friends, family and regional restaurants, the slow food movement may as well throw in the towel, because no one really cares anymore. I’m not ready to believe that is true.
The change to locally sourcing food could be a positive one, if for no other reason than the environmental impact of doing way with cargo loads of frozen beef patties. Ultimately though, McDonald’s still has to appeal to their consumers, and a large part of the appeal is in the uniformity of their product. That’s an impossible thing to accomplish when you’re dealing with local products on a global level.
Putting that aside, if this campaign were to become immensily successful in Italy, the sheer enormity of McDonald’s would also largely and directly influence every aspect of the Italian food chain, quite likely compromising its integrity. Italy would be forced to meet the demand for an abundance of bresaola, pancetta, parmesan and asiago, not to mention tomatoes, lettuce, etc. out of their natural growing seasons. It could blur the lines between “fast food” and “slow food” to a point where the “slow” reluctantly gets absorbed and homogenized. How would the rigid guidelines for what defines these unique ingredients not be compromised in an effort to meet the demand of a company as large as McDonald’s?
It would be great if McDonald’s would stumble upon something that would set a positive precedent for fast food chains everywhere, I just don’t see it happening. I’m not even sure it’s possible. Bada ba ba bottom line: the more McDonald’s profiting in Italy, the less Italian restaurants and regional flavors can thrive.
2 Comments
I agree with you on your comment that providing ingredients for McDOnald’s means providing a large amount of uniform food, but this will not really change so much. Patterns like this are already in place.
In Italy, like in most other modern industrialised countries, there are small-scale farmers and large-scale farmers. And like everywhere else, the large-scale farmers are well-connected to the system of mass distribution (like supermarkets or also fast-food chains), and will therefore be more able and likely to benefit/ profit from this venture. Most small-scale food producers are not part of the system, because they cannot provide food of unvarying quantity and unvarying characteristics on this scale, as is fundamentally required by the mass food distribution/ industry, or they couldn’t use it in their processing lines; that’s the very basis of mass production.
Do not make the mistake to think that DOP products, products of certified and protected origin or quality, are necessarily produced by small-scale/ idiosyncratic/ artisanal producers. Two examples: Parma ham and Parmesan cheese (the real thing, Parmigiano-Reggiano). Of course you will find some small producers that cure 40 hams a year, or cooperatives that produce a few hundred wheels of Parmigiano. But many of the producers of these products are seriously big, processing hundreds of pig legs or thousands of litres of milk every day. There is nothing in the DOP regulations that talks about scale, they talk about processing methods and origin of ingredients (PS. the legs of the pigs used in Parma ham, real certified Parma ham, can come from any of 11 Italian regions; that’s the official legal stipulation of Prosciutto di Parma DOP)
It was one of those large-scale producers of Parmigiano – legitimate DOP producer and member of the consorzio of Parmigiano-Reggiano – that last year went into a business agreement with McDonald’s and sold them a few thousand wheels of cheese.
In case you did not know this, last winter, McDonald’s in Italy featured a burger with Parmigiano-Reggiano DOP on it, and later in the year, one with DOP Speck from Alto Adige.
That was quite a controversial move by that Parmigiano producer, and certainly not everybody in the consorzio (which is an association to jointly promote their products, most DOP products have one) agreed with the sort of publicity it generated.
Be that as it may, my point is that one producer made money from that move, and a large one too, or how could he have provided McDonald’s with so much cheese? And the same will happen with the McItaly – the ones who will benefit and profit from Zaia’s €3 million will be a handful of industrial-scale food producers.
For the small producer, this won’t change a thing.
And apart from claims about (un)healthiness or also (non)tastiness of McDonald’s food, which is every individual’s choice, the biggest problem with fast food chains of any type and in fact mass distributors of any type is that they require an economy of scale which I think is detrimental to many things, from diversity (bio-diversity but also diversity of tastes for example) to things like the environmental damage produced by large-scale farming, like the massive production of methane by cows, which was never a problem as long as there were a few cows roaming about on green meadows…but that should be the topic for another discussion.
I was aware that there is nothing governing scale in terms of DOP and certified origin/quality products. It’s my understanding that it’s even one of the goals of an organization like Slow Food to encourage the consumption of these products, not isolate them for a chosen few. Bringing them to McDonald’s certainly opens them up to a larger scale of consumers and accomplishes that goal.
I had no idea that there had been a speck and Parmigiano burger last year and that this sort of move was more or less old news now. I imagine it’s safe to assume that run was successful enough to instigate this one and there will be more such burgers in the future, whether on a trial/novelty basis or as permanent fixtures on the menu. As long as regulation for certified quality remains untouched, it stands to reason that the quality of the products would never be compromised. I just have a really hard time wrapping my head around products reaching the level of McDemand and not somehow suffering because of it :)
Thank you very much for your comment.
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