What's the beef?
"McDonald’s food generally travels from huge, environmentally damaging farms ... to factories ... to fork." -Corporate Accountability International |
The necessity for beef in McDonald's continues to grow as the corporation founds more locations across the globe. With this, the problem of sustainable beef, or a reliable, safe supply of meat arises. Similar to Kroc's search for the perfect fry, the effects of such a large demand for sustainable beef causes a change for uniformity in the beef industry, and it calls for a quicker, more efficient method to be formed.
"In November 2010, the Who’s Who of the global beef industry found their way to Denver, Colorado. The event spurred an industry-wide dialogue on what it meant, and what it would take, to produce sustainable beef. From that event came a global roundtable devoted to the subject, the outlines of a sustainability standard and enough confidence on the part of McDonald’s, the world’s largest fast-food company, to announce a commitment this week to purchase sustainable beef starting in 2016. McDonald’s, along with the rest of the industry, had seen the writing on the barn wall: public health warnings against saturated fat; concerns about human immunity to antibiotics from residues of drugs used for cattle feed and therapy; protests against factory farming and animal cruelty; outbreaks of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as mad cow disease; growing awareness of the water and energy intensiveness of producing beef, and the water and air pollution produced along the way. 'One of the things that this whole group had in common was that their livelihoods were under attack,' says Michele Banik-Rake, McDonald’s director of sustainability, worldwide supply chain management. 'They needed to find another way.'" -Joel Makower of GreenBiz |