You're running McDonald's and you're the world's most successful fast-food chain, growing lately all over the world. That would seem to indicate an ever-expanding (no pun intended) audience of consumers worldwide who want to partake of your burgers, fries, salads and smoothies — right?

Yet across the United States and halfway across the world, more folks seem to be falling all over themselves demanding that McDonald's stay as far away from them as possible. Blame an obesity fixation.

In the U.K., for example, a leading medical academic (acamedic? or in this case, activist-medic) is calling McDonald's "unhelpful" for being a leading sponsor of the London Olympics this summer, along with another "unhelpful" corporate ogre, that Coca-Cola Company.Continue reading...

For more than a decade, Vermont artist Bo Muller-Moore has been making t-shirts that urge folks to “eat more kale” instead of, oh, fast food.

He’s received a lot of free publicity and an uptick in sales in recent months thanks to the legal eagles at Chick-fil-A who have been trying to get him to stop using the phrase after he filed for a trademark. The chain feels his t-shirt slogan is too close to its trademarked “Eat mor chikin” slogan (misspelled as a cow might spell it — if a cow could write signs begging fast food restaurant brands to serve another species' meat).

While plenty of folks have had a chuckle or two over the legal kerfuffle, it’s anything but funny to the food chain’s lawyers, who filed a complaint last week with the Trademark office that consumers may think the two messages are coming from the same place, according to Vermont's Burlington Free Press.

A day later, the Trademark office announced that it agreed with Chick-fil-A that "Eat more kale" is too close to "Eat more chikin," and now Muller-Moore has six months to respond or the rejection of this trademark request will become permanent.Continue reading...

A little anecdote from the booming Chinese port city of Dalian will tell you two different (but equally important) things about Apple's popularity in mainland China and what the brand is going through there.

It seems that the security detail from Mall 1 showed up at Mall 2 to "send a message." That message was communicated when Mall 1's security guards arrived at Mall 2 and knocked down billboards advertising the soon-to-open Apple store. That Apple store, set to the world's largest, will soon open at Parkland Mall. The mall is high-end and home to numerous foreign luxury brands. In fact, a close look at the video of the brouhaha, above, reveals it was shot from a Starbucks patio. (Starbucks, by the way, is plowing its way through China lately, too.)

And all this during a week when Apple CEO Tim Cook visited China, from the Foxconn factory floor to the vice premier, and the March 29th report on Foxconn seemed to make all Apple's Foxconn woes disappear.Continue reading...

Not surprisingly, the American news media have begun to move on from the outcry over Rush Limbaugh and the crumbling of his radio empire in the wake of the radio host's Sandra Fluke comments.

Chalk it up to subsequent breaking news, such as the Trayvon Martin case in Florida, nudging the right-wing radio commentator off the front pages of newspapers and websites in the past month. Or is it that, almost a month after Limbaugh's March 5th apology to Fluke, things are turning out differently than many on the left had hoped and imagined?Continue reading...

The general public got its first glimpse of "finely textured meat" (aka pink slime) almost a year ago, when Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution on ABC raised the issue with moms in a Los Angeles school district, but since then the hue and cry against the ammonia-treated filler has beent aken over by parents and nutritional advocates using, deftly, the free social media tools at their disposal.

The issue certainly caught the eye of Houston resident Bettina Siegel, who writes about kids and food on her blog, The Lunch Tray. Siegel posted a petition on Change.org on March 6th, rallying support to lobby Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to “put an immediate end to the use of ‘pink slime’ in our children’s school food.”

By the next day, more than 220,000 names had been added, rare for the site which launches 10,000 petitions on average each month. "It was incredible," said Brianna Cayo Cotter, communications director of Change.org, regarding Siegel’s petition. "In 10 days she made the USDA, the meat industry and major retailers all back away from it. Now the demand for pink slime has dropped so dramatically that some of the factories are starting to shut down."Continue reading...

"One Venti half-caf skim yuckaccino..." Consumers are bugging out about Starbucks' admission that the secret ingredient to the chain's strawberry frappuccinos is insects. Yes, Starbucks has revealed that cochineal extract, essentially pulped insects, is the secret ingredient bringing the red hue to its strawberry frapp.

Hey, it could be worse. It could be aborted stem cells.Continue reading...

As if there wasn't enough animosity, misinformation and outrage to go around in the Trayvon Martin case, now the dead boy's mother is moving to trademark her son's name. 

According to the Associated Press,

(A)n attorney for Martin's mother confirmed that she filed trademark applications for two slogans containing her son's name: "Justice for Trayvon" and "I Am Trayvon." The applications said the trademarks could be used for such things as DVDs and CDs. The trademark attorney, Kimra Major-Morris, said in an email that Fulton wants to protect intellectual property rights for "projects that will assist other families who experience similar tragedies." Asked if Fulton had any profit motive, the attorney replied: "None."

Some might argue that the trademark applications have nothing to do with innocence, guilt, or the character of the grieving family; this is just how things are done in America now and those looking for ulterior motives probably understand outrage more than trademark law.Continue reading...

The first thing one has to say about this new Turkish shampoo ad from Biomen is that der Führer did have quite the silky-looking head of hair. The second thing, of course: what the hell is going on here?

It's just one more in a long line of Hitler ads we've examined. And oh yeah, there are protestations. Translation of the ad after the jump.Continue reading...