Notes

Slay the McKiller Dragon
I remember a time when you could buy giant cokes at Maccas with almost 2 million joules (DietFacts.com, 2003) of wondrous energy in them. Oh, were those days good. Until I realised that having one of those a day wasn’t good for you. Well, that’s obvious isn’t it!
Well, clearly not for a lot of people, after seeing some pretty freaky stats. Did you know, for example, that a third of us are obese? I know right! If I were to pick three people randomly from some crowd, one of them would be fat.
Luckily, back in the naughties, a lad called “Morgan Spurlock” made a nice little doco about Maccas. He went on a McDiet for a month – yes, he ate nothing but Maccas for 30 days – and ended up getting 10 kilos heavier.
As we followed Spurlock through his 30 days, he showed us the seemingly obvious fact that Maccas makes you fat. He ended up having 9 super-sized meals through the month – each of these meals contained about 7 million joules worth of energy, that would then be (quite realistically) used, or rather not used, by sitting in a car and driving home.
Spurlock’s method of making this doco is a good way for him to gain control of his audience and sway them to whatever side he wanted – if he so desired, he could’ve made us think that Maccas was the healthiest thing you’d ever have, and even with all the common sense in the world, you’d not even think about it. It would, in a way, be the biggest advertising campaign.
But luckily, Spurlock is pretty great and he didn’t use his power for evil. Instead, he actually used it for good – unlike some doco makers that are out there. He used it against the great powers that be, the powers of the fast food industry that everyone loves. And although they don’t like to admit it, he used it to finally slay the (literally) super-sized monster: the McKiller.