It is wonderful that certain cultures still stick with great, old food traditions while individuals refuse to sell themselves, and their health, to the Gods of Food Convenience. According to this article, faux food had a fail in Bolivia.
As the Hispanically Speaking News reports, for well over a decade McDonald’s, with eight locations in the South American nation of 10 million people, worked to win over the Bolivian public with its Big Macs and McNuggets, but consistently found itself losing money. So, in light of the loss of revenue, McDonald’s Corporation made an unprecedented announcement: that it would close its restaurants in Bolivia — making it the only country in the Americas without a McDonald’s.
This story is odd in that it is being presented all over the web as McDonald’s closing all of its Bolivian locations in 2011, after 14 years of trying to win over customers. However, a deeper dive digs up the facts – that McDonald’s closed these restaurants way back in 2002, and this has only become a news story – now – because of a new documentary that has been released that describes why adherence to food traditions didn’t allow McDonald’s to make profits from its Bolivian locations. Almost every story on the web has reported this story incorrectly. Here’s a 2002 story on the McDonald’s closings from BBC News.
I hesitated linking to this article from a left-wing site called “tree hugger,” but the alternative was a strangely written piece in the Daily Kos that blames McDonald’s and KFC for rain forest destruction and “ethnic extinction.” The Daily Kos also gets the facts of the closings wrong, and as of yet, no correction. All of the confusion and misrepresentation of facts aside, I like this quote in the tree hugger article that talks about the documentary:
The documentary includes interviews with cooks, sociologists, nutritionists and educators who all seem to agree, Bolivians are not against hamburgers per sé, just against ‘fast food,’ a concept widely unaccepted in the Bolivian community.
Fast-food represents the complete opposite of what Bolivians consider a meal should be. To be a good meal, food has to have be prepared with love, dedication, certain hygiene standards and proper cook time.
