Press Release

Good morning. I am Deborah Lapidus from Corporate Accountability International. Tens of thousands of people have joined our Value [the] Meal campaign challenging McDonald’s and its competitors to value public health over short-term corporate profits, a demand echoed by the 20,000 people who signed the petitions that we delivered to you yesterday.

Mr. Skinner, our children are getting sick at alarming rates from the food they eat. Justifiable public concern, and even outrage, over the dangers of fast food and its marketing have prompted policy-makers, public officials and public health institutions to take coordinated action.

In San Francisco, we’ve seen the passage of a measure to limit toy giveaways to children’s meals that meet a very basic nutritional standard. Now other cities like New York are looking to take similar, practical measures.

Yet your corporation appears hell bent on preventing communities from securing health protections against your abusive practices. McDonald’s claims to advocate choice, but spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on the best PR, lobbyists, and lawyers money can buy to prevent communities from choosing to shut McDonald’s junk food marketing out. Nowhere is this more visible than recent efforts by you and your trade association to preempt policies like San Francisco’s in Arizona and Florida.

Your aggressive political interference puts both public health and your shareholders at significant risk. Considering the growing body of evidence linking junk food marketing to disease rates…considering recent findings by the Yale-Rudd Center that, despite pledges to the contrary, kids exposure to your junk food marketing has in fact increased…considering your so-called healthier menu items, such as oatmeal with the sugar content of a Snickers bar, are not in fact “healthy”…It is time for your corporation to stop with the empty promises and attempts to nutriwash your health footprint away and to instead conduct a thorough assessment of the corporation’s impact on people’s health as called for in the resolution in front of you today.

Mr. Skinner, when will McDonald’s stop aggressively interfering in public health policy and opposing democratic efforts to create a healthier food environment, free of junk food marketing, for our children and future generations?