An Urban Legend Examined

The other day the following e-mail was forwarded to me. Before anyone jumps on me, I recognized it for the urban legend that it was.

B E W A R E O F M C D O N A L D S

THIS IS BY A GOOD DECENT MAN WHO TOOK THE TIME TO WRITE THIS, AND HE SIGNED THE STATEMENT AND INCLUDED HIS CONTACT INFO:

READ ON:

I’m sure those of you who aren't in the cattle business don't understand the issues here. But to those of us whose living depends on the cattle market, selling cattle and raising the best beef possible... This is frustrating.

This will keep us from ever stopping there again, even for a drink.

The original message is from the Texas Cattle Feeders Association:

American cattle producers are very passionate about this.

McDonald’s claims that there is not enough beef in the USA to support their restaurants. Well, we know that is not so. Our opinion is they are looking to save money at our expense. The sad thing of it is that the people of the USA are the ones who made McDonald's successful in the first place, but we are not good enough to provide beef.

We personally are no longer eating at McDonald's, which I am sure does not make an impact, but if we pass this around maybe there will be an impact felt.

Please pass it on. Just to add a note:

All Americans that sell cows at a livestock auction barn had to sign a paper stating that we do NOT EVER feed our cows any part of another cow. South Americans are not required to do this as of yet.

McDonald’s has announced that they are going to start importing much of their beef from South America. The problem is that South Americans aren't under the same regulations as American beef producers, and the regulations they have are loosely controlled.

They can spray numerous pesticides on their pastures that have been banned here at home because of residues found in the beef. They can also use various hormones and growth regulators that we can't. The American public needs to be aware of this problem and that they may be putting themselves at risk from now on by eating at good old McDonald's.

American ranchers raise the highest quality beef in the world and this is what Americans deserve to eat. Not beef from countries where quality is loosely controlled. Therefore, I am proposing a boycott of McDonald’s until they see the light.

I’m sorry but everything is not always about the bottom line, and when it comes to jeopardizing my family's health, that is where I draw the line.

I am sending this note to about thirty people. If each of you send it to at least ten more (30 x 10 = 300) ... and those 300 send it to at least ten more (300 x 10 = 3,000) ... and so on, by the time the message reaches the sixth generation of people, we will have reached over THREE MILLION consumers!

I'll bet you didn't think you and I had that much potential, did you? Acting together we can make a difference. If this makes sense to you, please pass this message on.

David W. Forrest, Ph.D ., PAS, Dipl.
ACAP Department of Animal Science
Texas A&M University

Phone (979) 845-3560

Fax (979) 862-3399
2471 TAMU College Station, TX 77843-2471

Again, before any of you start snickering, yes, I do know this is not real. For those of you not familiar with it, here is a link to Snopes. Other reliable sources will also debunk it if you take but a moment to research it.

Why then am I blogging about it?

What first interested me was a response to sent to the person who forwarded it to me and cc’d to everyone on her list. It was from an individual who took it at face value and did the math of all the hard-working people who would be out of jobs if everyone banded together as the original letter writer suggested. As I read that e-mail, I thought, “But they’re both missing the point.” The original e-mail was not meant to be taken literally. Instead, it spoke to our fears and where we, as a people and a society, have found ourselves.

Back in the eighties or nineties, there was a similar urban legend about a person finding a deep fried rat in their bucket of restaurant-purchased fried chicken. That story, as false as it always was, spoke to the consumer’s lack of contact with their food source. At one time, if we wanted fried chicken, our grandmothers had to kill a chicken, preferably one that was beyond it’s egg-laying years, pluck it, gut it, cut it into pieces, flour those pieces, and then stand over a skillet filled with hot grease, carefully shifting and turning the pieces so they cooked evenly.

By the time I was a child, my mother no longer had to kill her own chickens, but if the family were to have friend chicken for dinner, she still had to cut the bird into appropriate-sized pieces, make certain it had been properly cleaned, make a mess of flour and seasoning, and standing over the skillet of popping oil or melted shortening to cook the pieces. I remember when my mother stopped doing that. She said, “Why should I mess up my clean kitchen when I can buy a perfectly good friend chicken from…?”

By that point, my mother was no longer a stay-at-home mom. She worked hours outside the home equal to what my father did. Her career was advancing, the children were growing, the financial resources within the family were improving as were the consumer products available for purchase. It took far more time and effort to make homemade fried chicken than it did to stop and pick some up on the way home. As an added benefit, someone else cleaned up the grease from cooking the bird.

The shift in our home was not unique. It was happening all over middle class America. Thing is, as our affluence increased, so did the distance from our food source. What the rat legend talked about was that distance. We didn’t know who was preparing our food anymore. We did know they had no reason to care for our family’s well-being like we did. They could do or feed anything to us and how would we know?

That’s the nature of fairy tales, myths, and legends. They speak to what’s true inside us, even when the scenarios they paint are not real. Urban legends speak directly to our inner fears, which are as true an emotion as anything else, even when they are based on unknown assumptions.

In the case of the McDonald’s tale, the underlying fear is the impersonalization of today’s big businesses, particularly the food providers. What do they care for their customers, especially when compared against the all-important bottom line? What are one or two human lives when it comes to making a buck? Unlike the corner grocer or the small town restaurant that was owned by our neighbor, who we could trust not to serve our children anything they would not serve their own, McDonald’s and similar restaurants are as removed from their consumer as they are from the food source. They are not in the business because they enjoy the culinary arts or because they like to provide people with a well-cooked meal. They are in business for the sake of business, to make a profit. They are a corporation. Beyond that, they could just as likely be selling construction equipment as burgers. They are not willing to spend a little more to keep their neighbors in business; they might cut corners in ways we would prefer them not to. This is not necessarily reality, but it is the truth of our underlying fear which this particular legend speaks to.

Let us look at how this open letter accomplishes this emotional reaction from us.

First, there’s the opening lines:

B E W A R E O F M C D O N A L D S

THIS IS BY A GOOD DECENT MAN WHO TOOK THE TIME TO WRITE THIS, AND HE SIGNED THE STATEMENT AND INCLUDED HIS CONTACT INFO:

The very first word provokes a fear response that harkens back to our childhood: BEWARE. Beware the dog. Beware strangers. Beware gun-totin’ maniacs. Beware big corporations, like McDonald’s, which, right up there with Wal-Mart, is synonymous with Big Business in America. We export Big Macs to other countries right alongside Walt Disney, as dual ambassadors for our country’s culture. There can be nothing more American than McDonald’s, and nothing more frightening than its signs proudly touting that billions of people have been served. Personal restaurants aren’t capable of serving billions. Only a large, impersonal corporation with assembly line technology could manufacture billions and billions of the same food product. This reaction is juxtaposed against the claim that the letter was written by a “good decent man.” Not a corporation. Not a business. But an individual. Not only that, he’s willing to offer us, the world, a piece of him by sharing his contact information. He’s personable. What could be more neighborly than giving your private phone number to the world-at-large in this age of internet aliases and unlisted cell phone numbers? This is a person you can trust because they are willing to put themselves out there.

If you call the number listed, you receive an automated recording telling you that the person’s mailbox – it doesn’t even name the person – is full and no longer able to accept messages. At least that’s what I received. Not nearly as personable or as real as it seems, is it? Of course, most people aren’t me. They wouldn’t pick up the phone to call a total stranger, so it’s an easy bluff to make. While I don’t think the individual listed as writing this letter ever existed, I suspect the phone number was real and belonged to a faculty or staff member at Texas A&M University. Someone doing a quick internet search would have found it associated with someone there and assumed they were the letter writer, but if only a small percentage of the people who received this letter picked up the phone and called, the individual would have been inundated with calls. They would have had to change the number and the university would have had stop using the one listed. The mailbox and computer generated greeting would be the standard one for all university numbers.

I base this suspicion on the fact that the original source of the information purports to be the Texas Cattle Feeder’s Association (TCFA), which is a real organization. They received so many inquiries over the years since this e-mail was released into the wild that they have put a disclaimer up on their website. They state they do not know the source of the e-mail or why someone had chosen to use their name. I do.

First, it’s real and lends an air of credibility to the letter. Again, the majority of people would not check with the organization. When something is printed, either electronically or in hardcopy, it gives a certain authority to the words. Somewhere in the back of our media-trained minds, we know that someone else has done their due diligence and authenticated the message. The actual letter writer took advantage of that built-in trust for the written word to further their own agenda.

The letter’s narrator goes on to say:

Our opinion is they are looking to save money at our expense. The sad thing of it is that the people of the USA are the ones who made McDonald's successful in the first place, but we are not good enough to provide beef.

This is another emotional gambit. The big, impersonal corporation is taking advantage of the little guy. As a culture, America has always favored the underdog. The Cinderella-story is part our common history. The Minute Man, rushing from their home in the middle of the night to defend their right to exist against the Imperial armies of King George III, and John Paul Jones declaring, “I have not yet begun to fight,” have always been our champions. Now, here is a new hero for this day and age, regretting that they have but one life to give. Cue the patriotic music.

With readers’ emotions already running high, the alleged sender ups the ante by adding a supposed personal note to the letter:

All Americans that sell cows at a livestock auction barn had to sign a paper stating that we do NOT EVER feed our cows any part of another cow. South Americans are not required to do this as of yet.

McDonald’s has announced that they are going to start importing much of their beef from South America. The problem is that South Americans aren't under the same regulations as American beef producers, and the regulations they have are loosely controlled.

This gentle aside is juxtaposed against the patriotic pitch in the earlier paragraphs and is designed t remind people that such threats as mad cow disease came not from US raised beef, but from imported beef, from that foreign beef. It is coupled with the growing suspicions about the effects of pesticides not only on our environment but also on the health of our developing children that has recently begun to infect the collective consumer conscious. Without saying any of these things specifically, it further inflame people’s passions and increase the “us vs. them” mentality. Just like the rat legend of years past, it insinuates that the business provider of our food cares nothing for our health. The writer does not have to spell these things out. S/he only has to hint at them and leave the rest to the readers’ imaginations.

With the emotional manipulation nearly complete, the actual writer brings all the threads of the legend back together and neatly unites them with the letter’s opening. What can we, the people do? We can start a grassroots campaign and through the united strength of each of us as David, we can bring Goliath down. We individuals, we rebels, can slay the corporate giant, and destroy the Evil Empire.

It’s all very slickly done. I’m impressed. It took a very skilled writer to tug at people’s emotions this way and to get them to look past the obvious fallacy and buy into the legend without thought or further consideration. I’m also intrigued by what it says about us as a culture and I’m curious what it means for us, both now and in the future.

What are your thoughts?