Lifting the Veil on McDonald's Fries: See How They're Made

This video made by McDonald's Canada demonstrating--with folksy Canadian charm--how French fries are made is impressive at first glance. (It's part of an overall strategy launched by the global company this year to demonstrate the "authenticity" of its fast-food.)  In it, Scott Gibson from the "Supply Chain Department" proudly portrays the creation of the company's famous fries as a farm to table affair. But watch closely.

Mario Dupuis, the processing plant production manager, explains the fries are "blanched (quick boiled) to remove the natural sugars", then dextrose (the British word for glucose, the most basic form of sugar) is added to maintain "consistent" appearance. 

Mario says, "The process of making a `Mac fry' is relatively simple." This is true from the standpoint of industrial product production (it's a lot simpler than making an iPhone for instance), but from a nutritional perspective this French fry prep method is a bit complicated--dare we say sinister?

After turning the potatoes into sugar sticks, the company sprays them with an "ingredient" to stop them from "greying;" fries them at the plant, freezes them, puts them in plastic bags and ships `em out. At each "restaurant" the frozen, preserved, sugared potatoes are fried for a second time.

Finally, Mr. Gibson earnestly demonstrate that about a teaspoon of salt is used for every 4 servings of fries....that's about a quarter of the daily allowance of salt for one side dish. 

Using data from Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation it's been estimated that McDonalds sells just over 2.7 billion pounds of French fries in the U.S. alone each year. That's a lot of potatoes served with extra sugar, extra fat, extra salt and a dash of a color-retaining agent.

Finally, when you consider the fossil fuels required to get them from the farm, through the machine-intensive processing phase into the front seat of your car at the drive-thru wouldn't you rather eat an apple and call it a day?

Update on Tuesday, December 4, 2012 at 10:17AM by Kathy

McDonald's is at it again. Here's a video (with over 1 million views on youtube) of one of the company's independent cattle ranchers, who built his ranch on the site of an old coal mine. "We took something that some folks would have said was absolutely worthless and now we've got it producing food for people all around the world," he boasts. The rancher neglects to say how he reclaimed the coal-mining land, which could have had contaminated aquifers, underground fires or subsidence (the collapse of old mine shafts.) Watch it here, either you'll love it or love to hate it.