The Moral Malaise of McDonaldization: The Values of Vegetarianism

Burger Chains and Bus Drivers

On 23 November 1996 the Guardian newspaper published a few ‘News McNuggets’ (Ritzer, 1993: 57). One of them can be quoted in full:

There are a number of ways in which this item can be read. First, it is a prime example of the McDonaldization of news. As Ritzer says of all ‘News McNuggets’, the story about the Californian bus driver has been ruthlessly edited so that it has no context and is, instead, just a statement of the bare facts (Ritzer, 1993: 57–8). A second reading would see the story as just the most recent example of the American fondness for litigation. But there is a third approach, an approach which highlights what the bus company did not see, what Ritzer's account of McDonaldization does not see, but what the bus driver was able to see very clearly indeed. This third approach emphasizes the moral questions which can be asked about McDonaldization. The bus driver saw that consuming burgers can be an immoral act and that, for a vegetarian, McDonaldization might need to be resisted even to the point of threatening one's own economic livelihood.

Presumably, the Californian bus company and the burger chain set up their relationship because it made good commercial sense for both sides. The bus company could subsidize the costs of its operations while the burger chain was able to target a desired market of consumers and attract them into the restaurants where they would spend money. For the bus company and the burger chain alike, this is a purely commercial issue. But the vegetarian bus driver saw the issue in much more moral terms. The bus driver realized that the bus passengers were being encouraged to eat parts of the corpses of dead (or, as most vegetarians would put it, murdered) animals. Through this moral approach to an otherwise straightforward commercial exchange, the [Page 208]bus driver was able to see that she or he had a responsibility or a right to stop others from indulging in immoral practices. The bus driver saw the blood and not the relish dripping from the burger. The bus company, the burger chain and George Ritzer never ever glimpsed the blood and flesh.

It is this question of the relationship between McDonaldization and morality which this chapter seeks to explore. Specifically, I want to propose that Ritzer's own account of McDonaldization mirrors the moral emptiness which rational organizations require and promote; Ritzer's account of McDonaldization is itself as morally empty as the world it seeks to describe. Yet more broadly, I use this chapter as an opportunity to examine whether vegetarianism is a viable way of resisting the rationalization of the world. This chapter is about whether the moral vacuum surrounding McDonaldization is inevitable or whether some individuals, through their own convictions, can enable us all to glimpse what we are really eating.

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