More beef! More!

McDonald’s is bringing its triple cheeseburger to the U.K., stacking pucks of beef high as it already does in the U.S. and Australia, with a 60-store trial likely to give way to a fully fledged roll-out. It’s a strange product launch, lacking the quick-to-deflate novelty of last year’s spicy chicken nuggets, instead borrowing its intrigue from the fact of putting one piece of meat on top two more, from the layering of fused, lurid cheese on top of savoury beef, from basic pleasure hitherto unavailable on these shores.

But — as Alicia Kennedy makes clear in The New Republic, divorcing McDonald’s lifestyle burger brand clout from the food policies that make that clout accessible is not responsible, and adding a menu option that requires even more intensively farmed beef at a business that relies extensively on intensively farmed beef is at best a rogue move, even if the company is, it says, adhering to strict targets on cutting its global emissions.

And in other news...

The “one bad meal means a restaurant is bad” argument ignores the inverse, which is that one great meal does not mean a restaurant is all good. Three visits is as much about digging for flaws as it is searching for redemption. — Besha Rodell (@BeshaRodell) February 26, 2020