Interview: Come eat with me

Over the past half-century, millions of people worldwide have chomped through trillions of McDonald’s burgers and fries. But by the turn of the millennium, critics had made the corporation shorthand for everything that’s bad in food in rich countries: over-processed, fatty, unhealthy. Faced with this image problem, and stalling and falling profits, McDonald’s began fighting back. In 2003 – in what will sound to some a deeply ironic gesture – it set up the Global Advisory Council on Healthy Lifestyles. Its role was to reform McDonald’s from within and make the company look like it was taking the global obesity epidemic seriously.…