This McDonald's-produced video is making the rounds today. In it, a supposed McRib "skeptic" learns that nothing but the most wholesome food goes into McRibs. Or something like that:

So here's the arc of the video: A man retweets a photograph of a frozen McRib patty and basically calls it disgusting. So McDonald's employees show him how they grind pork into a patty and freeze it so it looks exactly like the disgusting frozen patty he was mocking on Twitter, but he decides for some reason that it doesn't look as gross anymore. Then he eats it and thinks it's delicious. End of ad. (Notice nobody asks about the ingredients of the barbecue sauce the pork patty is slathered in, or what the bun is made out of.)

I just don't understand what the point of this video is. McDonald's is actively trying to debunk the worst rumors about their food, which is a maneuver that, to me, reeks of desperation. (People have been making stuff up about McDonald's for decades now. But suddenly, now that McDonald's is financially hurting, they decide to address all these rumors.) Does transparency, seeing where the food comes from, make anyone hungry? The whole farm-to-table trend involves the myth of transparency, but it's really more about storytelling; people want to hear about the chicken's good life, but they want the narrator to skip over the chicken's death. And if McDonald's really wants to be transparent, why didn't this video start at the slaughterhouse?

I'm not a vegan. Hell, I'm not even a vegetarian. But this kind of selective honesty is, to me, worse than institutional silence. A McDonald's that wants to be my buddy is somehow even worse than a McDonald's that wants to shove its sludge down my throat until I die.