Burger King Breaks the Mold

Unbelievable...Burger King has seen the writing on the wall and is the first, major fast food company to say they would start buying pork and eggs from producers who use progressive animal welfare practices. What a concept. Although their inital change will only affect 2% of their purchasing, that is a huge impact when you consider how much they buy in a year. Their producers will have to wake up and start thinking about changing their farming practices, or else...

http://www.hsus.org/farm/news/ournews/burger_king.html

McDonald's, wake up. This could be the beginning of your end. But according to this article in the NY Times, McDonalds has already awoken.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/28/business/28burger.html?_r=3&pagewanted=1&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

At Princeton's Food, Ethics and the Environment conference earlier this year, a representative from McDonalds told the audience that McDonald's could only affect the first tier supplier in their buying structure. I was able to speak to this and commented to the gentleman who was sitting like a lamb in a den of wolves (bad pun, but everyone in the room was a foodie with sustainability on their mind, not Big Macs) that it was disengenuous for McDonalds to claim that they could not affect the food chain. I stated that it was BECAUSE of companies like McDonalds, whose budgets dwarfed some countries' economies, that the state of agriculture was as it was today. What I didn't say was this...the only reason McDonalds makes so much money is because their food is cheap. Their impact on the economy of scale has been the driving force behind cheap, well traveled, over processed food. If it were expensive, nobody would buy it.

The politics of food and the consumer's purse string power are having an effect on the food supply. And not a moment too late.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kerry-trueman/burger-king-boards-the-an_b_44526.html