Thursday, October 28, 2004

What it's like working for ... McDonald's

The Times, Graduate/Management

Daniel Allen discovers that there is a whole lot more to the fast-food giant than the array of spotty teenagers on the tills
RACHEL KNIGHT is a 29-year-old graduate in modern European studies with French. She earns £25,000 a year, has a company car and benefits that include private healthcare and six weeks’ holiday a year. Next month she’s off to a company convention in Sydney, all expenses paid. Her job? Restaurant manager in Leyland, Lancashire. The company? McDonald’s.

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Saturday, October 23, 2004

How France keeps children out of McDonald's

The Times

By Adam Sage

School dinners can turn a canteen into a restaurant.
BRYCE, a lanky 17-year-old with short, spiky hair finished his plate of bull stew and polenta, looked up and smiled.
“That was good,” he said. “I reckon this must be one of the best restaurants in town.”
Sitting next to him at a long, formica table yesterday, his teenage classmates nodded in approval. They are pupils at the Lycée de L’Empéri in Salon de Provence, near Marseille, where they enjoy what are widely described as the finest school dinners in France.
“The food here is really exceptional,” said Germaine Roche, a philosophy teacher, who was tucking into a leek soufflé. “It’s a pleasure.”

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Monday, October 18, 2004

Delhi tastes 'slow food' revolution

BBC News

By Geeta Pandey, BBC correspondent in Delhi

Delhi has become the latest city to join the slow food revolution.
The Indian capital has recently seen the opening of its first slow food cafe.
It was inaugurated by Carlos Petrini, the Italian founder of the movement that tries to counter the consumption of fast food worldwide.
The movement began in Italy about 20 years ago and has now spread to 45 countries across five continents and has more than 80,000 members.

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Saturday, October 02, 2004

McDonald's critics are just talking junk

The Times

By Mick Hume

I confess that we sometimes allow our young daughters to eat fast food.
After all, it doesn’t seem to have done Wayne “Whoppa” Rooney much harm, does it? These days, however, buying your children the odd McDonald’s Happy Meal is enough to bring the miserabilist tendency out in boils.
Many now seem to agree with the American professor who described McDonald’s advertising as “the last socially acceptable form of child abuse”. This week, when McDonald’s UK announced that profits had stagnated, the gleeful response brought to mind the corporation’s advertising slogan “We’re lovin’ it”.

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