Now I Know (13 page)

Lyman Cutlar, an American farmer, was one of those settlers. On June 15, 1859—thirteen years to the day after the two nations signed the Oregon Treaty—Cutlar noticed a pig, owned by Charles Griffin, an employee of the British Hudson Bay Company, eating Cutlar’s potato crops. Cutlar considered the pig a trespasser and, angered—this was not the first time this had happened—shot the pig. Cutlar offered Griffin $10 in compensation; Griffin demanded $100. Cutlar withdrew his offer, now believing he was fully within his rights to shoot the (trespassing) pig. Griffin called upon the British authorities to arrest Cutlar. Cutlar and other American settlers, in turn, requested that the American military protect them from the British. Things quickly spiraled out of hand and within two months the forces described above camped on and around San Juan Island, both with strict orders not to fire the first shot. (Opposing troops did, however, toss insults, hoping to coax each other into violating this order.)

Things came to a head when word of the conflict reached Washington, D.C. and London. Both sides wished to keep this conflict bloodless and agreed to jointly occupy San Juan Island peacefully, each with a military base on the island. In 1874, a panel of international arbitrators declared the Haro Strait to be the border and awarded San Juan Island to the United States; the British closed up their base soon thereafter.

The Bahamas is made up of roughly 700 islands scattered southeast of Florida and north of Cuba. One of those islands, Staniel Cay, is a sand-covered reef in the center of the Bahama’s Exuma island chain; it is one of the few Exuma islands with a permanent population. Staniel Cay is most notable for two things: Part of the James Bond movie
Thunderball
was filmed there, and it is home to the Staniel Cay Yacht Club, which serves as the nautical center of the immediate vicinity.

That’s the only place you’ll get to see swimming pigs.

Nearby Staniel Cay is an uninhabited island called Big Majors Spot—uninhabited by people, that is. A bunch of feral cats and a few families of pigs live there. The pigs—being the voracious omnivores pigs are—will eat anything they can find. So when visitors come to the island and toss them apple cores and virtually anything else, the pigs feast.

But these pigs are a bit impatient. Over the years, they and their offspring have learned that the sound of motorboats means that there’s food to be had, so the pigs take the initiative—and take to sea. The pigs swim right up to the boats, doggy paddling away, in hopes of obtaining a tasty morsel or two. (You’ll find plenty of videos on YouTube if you need to see it to believe it.)

How did pigs get to a small tropical island far from the mainland? We don’t know, but there are three possibilities: The pigs ended up there after a shipwreck; farmers came to Big Majors Spot and abandoned their pigs there; or perhaps, residents of Staniel Cay and other inhabited islands put the pigs there as a somewhat underhanded way to fatten them up, on the cheap, before eating them.

In support of that final theory? Attend a celebration at Staniel Cay, and you’ll notice pig on the menu.

Defamation, in the United States, is a difficult legal cause of action in which to prevail, especially if the side making the claim is a public figure or corporation. The First Amendment codifies the right to freedom of speech, which among other things protects Americans’ right to engage in debates pertaining to items in the public interest.

But outside the United States there is no First Amendment, and in many cases protections of speech and expressive action are much weaker. In countries such as the United Kingdom a corporation’s ability to successfully sue someone for defamation is markedly greater. No one knows this better than Helen Steel and David Morris.

In 1986, a group called “London Greenpeace” (unaffiliated with the well-known group Greenpeace) began distributing a pamphlet in the UK accusing McDonald’s of a variety of things, ranging from starving Third World children and poisoning their UK customers to paying low wages and being cruel to chickens and other animals. Over the next few years, McDonald’s attempted to infiltrate the group, likely with the intention of finding a way to shut them down.

In 1990, McDonald’s identified five of the people spreading the leaflets and brought libel charges against them. Three of the five settled and apologized, rather than incur massive legal fees and put their lives on hold while litigating the question. But Steel and Morris decided that they wanted their day in court. Representing themselves (with some pro bono assistance), the pair spent £30,000 (to McDonald’s millions) to defend themselves.

Defending oneself against a UK libel claim is no small task. The burden is on the defendants to prove that each of the claims that they made is, factually, true. Given the number and gravity of Steel and Morris’s allegations (assuming they were true in the first place, and who knows?), doing so was virtually impossible. But they tried; they called roughly 180 witnesses during 300 days in court.

And they lost. The court found that although some of their claims were true, such as the accusations of low wages, the pair failed to establish the truth of many other assertions. (The court was unwilling, for example, to grant that McDonald’s poisoned its customers.) McDonald’s was awarded £60,000, later reduced to £20,000 on appeal—but the victory was a Pyrrhic one. The money was a equivalent to a rounding error, at best, for the multinational restaurant giant. For Steel and Morris, however, it was a ticket to more attention than they’d ever dreamed of receiving. McDonald’s became an anathema in many UK communities.

So did the British libel laws. As reported by
The
New York Times
, in 2005—nearly two decades after the pamphlets first came out—Steel and Morris sued the British government in the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that the sanctions levied against them violated the European Convention on Human Rights adopted in the 1950s. There, the two prevailed—the Court awarded them £57,000 from the UK government, roughly equal to the amount they owed McDonald’s plus their legal costs along the way.

Fast food has its staples: hamburgers and cheeseburgers, french fries, soda, probably a chicken option such as nuggets or a grilled sandwich. More “exotic” offerings include onion rings, milkshakes, hash browns, and fried fish items. But rarely—Wienerschnitzel franchises excepted—are hot dogs on the menu. For McDonald’s, there’s a reason. Blame Ray Kroc, the man who bought the tiny company in 1954 and turned it into a multibillion-dollar fast food behemoth.

In 1977, Kroc wrote an autobiography titled
Grinding It Out: The Making Of McDonald’s
, documenting his vision for burgers and fries made quickly, cheaply, and on an immense scale. In the book he notes that McDonald’s is always experimenting with new potential additions to the menu, going so far as to say that “it’s entirely possible that one day we’ll have pizza [on the menu].” (Pizza was indeed tested, and made the menu of roughly 500 stores before being withdrawn. According to Wikipedia, though, McPizza was recently available at three McDonald’s locations in Spencer, West Virginia, Orlando, Florida, and New Haven, Connecticut.) But Kroc singled out hot dogs as the one food beyond the pale of even experimentation: “On the other hand, there’s damned good reason we should never have hot dogs. There’s no telling what’s inside a hot dog’s skin, and our standard of quality just wouldn’t permit that kind of item.”

Nevertheless, Kroc’s edict did not withstand the test of time. McDonald’s has tested hot dogs—the McHotDog, naturally—in a number of markets, most notably at the location in Toronto’s SkyDome (now the Rogers Centre), home of the Toronto Blue Jays. Apparently, in Canada, there’s nothing more American than a hot dog at a baseball game.

The price of a large order of french fries at a American McDonald’s runs about $2.25, give or take a dime or a quarter. The price in Japan is roughly the same—240 yen, or about $2.50. Usually. In the fall of 2012, Japanese Mickey D’s ran a promotion advertising large fries for only 150 yen, or about $1.55. The promotion worked better than anyone ever imagined.

Or worse than anyone ever feared—depending on your perspective.

Japanese culture eschews waste, especially when it comes to food. If you put it on your plate, you are expected to finish it, and an order of fries at McDonald’s is no exception. At about 500 calories per order, buying two large orders of fries is therefore out of the question, at least if you’re eating alone and especially if you have a burger to go with it. But what if you had a group of people? Pooling your money—and your calories—you could probably buy and eat a lot of french fries.

In October of that year, a group of Japanese teens did just that, creating an ad hoc “potato party” by purchasing twenty-three orders of fries and dumping them out across their trays. Normally, this is where the story would end. Even if the store manager made a stink over the gluttony—which would be unlikely to cause a scene, given the Japanese rules of decorum—there is little reason to believe that anyone outside that particular McDonald’s would notice. But this was the new normal. The teens did what almost any group of teens in 2012 would do—they took a picture and put it on Twitter. As video game culture blog Kotaku reported, thousands of other East Asian teens noticed and began creating “potato parties” of their own.

These parties were not good for business. Crowds gathered whenever one spontaneously broke out, disrupting the flow of traffic for other customers. Many Japanese saw the behavior as disrespectful, but others fueled the fire as one-upmanship took hold. At the apex, a group of teens ordered sixty portions of large fries. They finished them all and found an audience in the tens of thousands on Twitter in the process.

The potato parties ended in Japan when the 150-yen promotion also came to a halt. Simply put, topping the record of sixty orders of large fries would require well over $150 dollars, a hefty price to pay anywhere. But for some reason, South Koreans had no problem with the price tag. A report on
msn.com
told the story of teenagers there buying $250 worth of french fries—but without as much success. Many were rebuffed by store managers unwilling to turn their eateries into circuses.

The graph above shows the birth rate in Japan from the twenty-year period beginning in 1955 and ending in 1974. By and large, the curve is relatively stable; give or take, there were between 17 and 19 births per 1,000 people in any given year—except 1966. That year, the birth rate fell to 13.7 births per 1,000 people, easily the lowest during the two-decade period.

What happened? Blame the Fire Horse.

Many Japanese follow the Shengxiao (to Americans, the Chinese zodiac), a series of twelve animals, which rotates annually. Each of the twelve animals has characteristics associated with it—the snake, for example, is said to be intelligent but unscrupulous, whereas the monkey is curious but often headstrong. Every year in late January or early February, as part of the Chinese New Year rituals, the animal of the year changes and people born during the next twelve months or so are thought to have the characteristics of that animal.