The Journal de Montréal loves to manufacture controversy to sell papers. It’s what they do best. Sometimes it works, and leads to government action political grand-standing.
Other times, it just leaves you shaking your head.
Today, I was handed a Journal free outside the metro station. On its cover (while everyone else was talking about this silly Kosovo thing), a special EXCLUSIVE report about fast food.
It seems the Journal had “grand chef” Thierry Daraize (actually, he’s more of a chef-turned-food-columnist, for newspapers including the Journal, which makes me wonder why he didn’t write the stories himself), and had him apply UNDER COVER to work at fast food restaurants like McDonald’s, Burger King, and KFC.
His conclusions:
- The restaurants’ policies emphasize speed over quality of food
- Fast food is prepared in advance and kept warm for hours at a time
- Fast food is greasy
- Burgers are not prepared carefully — ingredients are just slapped onto the bun
- Food ingredients come pre-cut so employees don’t waste time chopping veggies
- Soft drinks are dispensed through a machine that combines a concentrated syrup with carbonated water — and those drinks are watered down
That’s it. No rats, secret poisons, spitting into the burgers, crimes against humanity. Nothing but a bunch of tidbits that any idiot who’s worked in the industry already knows.
And yet the Journal devoted their first four pages this morning, plus the cover, to this non-story. And they’ll be continuing the series for two more days. Somehow I doubt his findings will suddenly become more interesting.
The Journal doesn’t have a monopoly on overblown giant features that waste journalistic resources stating the obvious, or talk about insanely uninteresting things, for days on end (*cough*). But they seem to have turned it into an art.