Why McDonald's changed its French fries recipe
A glaring report has found why McDonald’s French fries don’t taste as good as they once did back in the 90s.
Canadian journalist Malcolm Gladwell hosts a podcast called Revisionist History, which looks at all things overlooked and misunderstood.
He dug deep to investigate why McDonald’s changed its recipe to create a product that “tastes like cardboard”, Gladwell said.
“They made the world’s greatest French Fry. Then they threw it away,” he said on his podcast.
Gladwell's sleuthing takes him back to when McDonald’s changed their recipe for French fries on July 23, 1990. And the fast food chain hasn’t looked back.
It’s all thanks to a man called Phil Sokolof, an American crusader whose heart attack in 1966 “turned him into a national evangelist of a low-cholesterol diet,” according to The New York Times.
After a heart attack at 43, the businessman spent $3 million of his own money financing newspaper ads condemning fast food chains like McDonald’s for poisoning America.
He founded the National Heart Savers Association in 1985 and convinced McDonald’s to produce a low-fat, low-cholesterol hamburger in 1991.
“I can’t say we’re going to tear down the golden arches by the year 2000,” Mr. Sokolof told The New York Times in 1990, “but I am confident that by the year 2000 they are going to be serving more healthful food.”
At the time, McDonald’s was cooking its French fries in beef tallow, an animal fat.
After Sokolof put out a full-page ad attacking the chain, headlined “the poisoning of America”, accusing McDonald’s of selling fries loaded in fat, McDonald's had to act.
Although the chain denied the claim, it finally gave in on July 23, 1990 and changed the oil the fries are cooked in, thereby completely changing its taste.
Gladwell explained that by changing the fat, described as “Formula 47”, McDonald’s changed everything about the fry.
“They went from frying them in beef tallow to frying them in some combination of vegetable oil,” Gladwell explained.
“And as you dig into this, what you realise is that that is not an inconsequential move. It’s not like when you’re frying an egg where it doesn’t really matter what you fry it in. A fried egg is a fried egg.
“A French fry is a combination of a potato and some kind of cooking element. The thing you fry it in becomes a constituent part of the fry.”
But as it turns out, they were wrong.
“It turns out to be false that vegetable oil is healthier for you than beef tallow,” Gladwell said. “So not only did they destroy the French fry, they gave us something that was worse for us from a health perspective. So everything about it was a mistake.
“If they had any balls at all, they would turn around and say, ‘We were wrong, and we’re going back to fries the old way,’” he said.
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