The McDonalds Lawsuit That Never Happened

[00:00:00]Jamie Oliver took McDonald's to court, and he won. He proved the food was toxic, and he forced them to change the recipe. And now you've probably seen the clip. There's a British chef in rubber gloves standing in front of a cabinet stocked with bleach and window cleaner, and behind him there's a washing machine packed full of raw meat. He picks up a bottle of ammonia with a skull and crossbones on the label, and he pours it straight into the tub of meat.

[00:00:25]So, if you've heard this one, and plenty of people have, where did you hear it?

[00:00:29]And now take a second and actually think about this. The article, the headline, maybe the person who told you.

[00:00:36]But you can't. Nobody can, because it never happened.

[00:00:41]There's no case, there's no court, no judge, no ruling, no settlement.

[00:00:46]Oliver's own team told the AFP news agency that he never took legal action against McDonald's, not once. Africa Check went looking, and so did Lead Stories, and Boom in India, and The Journal over in Ireland back in January.

[00:01:00]Nobody has ever found a case.

[00:01:03]15 years of people debunking it, and it's going around again right now.

[00:01:08]Somebody sent it to us this morning.

[00:01:10]Maybe it was you.

[00:01:12]And this is what should bother you. A story with nobody behind it can walk into your head, live there for years, and come back out your mouth at a table in front of people whose opinion of you matters. You'd sound sure, but you'd be wrong, and you'd be doing it on behalf of something that never happened. And whoever passed it to you was every bit as sure as you were. Stories like this one travel on people who'd bet money on them.

[00:01:37]Now, sure, it's a hamburger, who cares?

[00:01:40]Except a hamburger is the smallest thing this happens to. It's also how you got what you believe about a war, or an election, or what your dad said to you in 1998. It's also a game you probably played played as a little kid, and I'm going to show you how it works. But first, let's unpack the story.

[00:01:58]I'm Molly Reed. Welcome to Intelligence Brief.

[00:02:02]>> [music] >> All right, so let's start with the truth about what really happened. It's April 12th, 2011, on Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, and about 5 million people are watching. What goes in that washing machine is the beef trimmings, which are the scraps left after the good cuts come off. And the real factory blasts those scraps with ammonia gas to kill bacteria. Oliver used a bottle in a washing machine instead. Now, it made for great TV, but it's also not how the stuff is made. A government scientist had called it pink slime in an email years earlier. And the name stuck.

[00:02:40]And about those trimmings, Oliver says, "This is not fit for human consumption."

[00:02:45]And he's talking about the trimmings. He wasn't talking about a Big Mac.

[00:02:50]The backlash is enormous, and the record goes like this. In April, he airs it. By August, the stuff is out of McDonald's supply chain. In January, they announce it, and they say the decision wasn't related to any particular event. Burger King dropped it, too, and gave the same statement.

[00:03:07]And the Daily Mail runs the headline, "Jamie Oliver Victory."

[00:03:11]Victory. That's one word doing all the work.

[00:03:15]So, did Oliver cause that? A former USDA food safety chief said publicly that the show is what did it. McDonald's says they were already reviewing their beef standards, and he had nothing to do with it. Nobody can prove either one.

[00:03:29]It took four months. No lawyer, no filing, no courtroom, and the ammonia was out of the burgers. And nobody can tell you what actually changed their mind.

[00:03:41]So, why did the fake story win? Because the true one has no ending. It doesn't even have a cause. And look at how the true one goes. A A complains on television. A corporation changes a and says he had nothing to do with it.

[00:03:55]There's no moment, nobody wins, nobody admits anything, it just stops.

[00:04:00]Now, how the fake one goes, little guy sues the giant, the giant loses, the judge rules, the recipe changes. That one has a beginning, a middle, and a gavel at the end. It's a real David versus Goliath story and it plays out on our desire to see the underdog win.

[00:04:17]And one of those is what happened. The other one is just a story. And when you hand somebody a true story with a hole where the ending goes, they don't leave it open. They fill it and they don't do it on purpose. They fill it with the ending that belongs to that kind of story.

[00:04:33]And three things happened to this one on the way to your feed. The scraps became the burger. Oliver said the scraps weren't fit to eat. The retelling says the food isn't fit to eat. One word moved and the whole meaning changed.

[00:04:47]Four months of anger became one afternoon in court. Nobody can picture four months of anger. Everybody can picture a courtroom though. You've seen that room a hundred times in different movies.

[00:04:58]And quitting became losing. McDonald's said they decided. The retelling says they were forced. Because forced has a winner in it and decided doesn't.

[00:05:07]Nobody wrote this version of the story.

[00:05:10]It got there one retelling at a time.

[00:05:13]>> [music] >> All right, so this is usually where I run the SciOps index and score how engineered a story is. But I'm not running it today because I can't find anybody running this. There's no campaign, no talking points, nobody with a stake pushing it out. It's just people who liked the story and passed it on. If I told you otherwise, I'd be handing you a villain because a villain makes it a better story.

[00:05:36]Some stories just get rebuilt a little bit each time by everybody who tells them. And that's the worst problem, honestly, because there's nobody to arrest.

[00:05:47]So you've probably played this game as a kid. It's called telephone. Somebody whispers a sentence, it runs down a line of about 20 kids, and what comes out the other end has nothing to do with what went in. And it's funny because nobody cheated. Everybody in that line was trying. 20 honest kids turned one sentence into a different one.

[00:06:06]And not one of those kids can feel themselves changing it. Ask any of them and they'll swear they passed on exactly what they heard. There's no moment where you catch yourself doing it. The whisper you pass is the whisper you got, as far as you can tell.

[00:06:20]Now, think about how much of what you know you never actually saw. Somebody told you, and somebody told them, and you have no idea how many people it went through before that. That's how most of our memories get formed.

[00:06:33]In 1932, a psychologist at Cambridge named Frederick Bartlett turned it into an experiment. He reads British students a Native American folk tale called The War of the Ghosts. And he picked it because it's strange to them. It's got ghosts and canoes and seal hunting and an unexplained death at the end.

[00:06:52]And then he has them tell it back. Then he has them do it again weeks later, and again years after that. And in another version, he runs it down a line of people exactly like the telephone game.

[00:07:02]And every version that came back was more finished than the one before it.

[00:07:07]Canoes turned into boats, seal hunting turned into fishing, the ghosts got left out, and the ending, the part that made no sense to a British college kid, turned into something that wrapped up the story nice and clean. By the end of the story, it was shorter, smoother, and wrong. And every teller was honest.

[00:07:25]Remembering did that to them all by itself.

[00:07:29]Bartlett called it reconstructive memory. Every time you remember something, you build it again from scratch out of stories you already know.

[00:07:37]So, you're never remembering the event itself. You're remembering a memory of a memory of a memory.

[00:07:43]And that's your brain working efficiently. You can't store the entire world, so you keep the general event plus anything that surprised you about it, and everything else gets filed back in from what you already know.

[00:07:55]So, the scraps became the burger. Four months of anger became one afternoon in court. Quitting became losing. That's the lesson. Nobody lied. Everybody remembered it the way they think it should have gone.

[00:08:08]And this is old. Every folktale you know is the version that survived thousands of retellings.

[00:08:14]And that hands you something you can use. When a story fits perfectly, clean villain, clean win, clean lesson, it's been through a lot of hands. Real things have loose ends.

[00:08:26]And I'll turn it on myself. This brief is a retelling. I read the news and reports from Congress, and I'm handing you something shorter and cleaner than what I read, because otherwise you leave. So, notice how neatly all of this fit together. Then ask what I dropped to make it fit.

[00:08:42]It only works on you while you think you're playing the tape back.

[00:08:48]So, I don't have a war to forecast today, but this story runs a pattern you can watch.

[00:08:53]One, every time around it picks up a detail it didn't have before. The version going around now added highly toxic, which Oliver never said and no food safety agency has ever found. So, watch what gets added next.

[00:09:07]And next, watch for a number. Whichever version finally gets a dollar figure attached is the one that never dies. A number feels like a receipt.

[00:09:16]And last, watch yourself. You know this is false right now, but check in 6 months whether you kept what was the correction or what was the claim.

[00:09:26]It did all of that in 2018 and in 2021 and in January, and it's doing it right now.

[00:09:36]So, two things to take with you.

[00:09:38]First, when a story has a verdict in it, ask where the courtroom was. Real outcomes leave a paper trail. Case numbers, filings, dates. If nobody can tell you which court, then there wasn't one.

[00:09:50]Second, when a story ends a little too well, you're looking at what's left after a lot of people needed it to make sense.

[00:09:58]Thanks for watching Intelligence Brief.

[00:10:00]I'm Molly. Stay expensive.

[00:10:03]>> [music]