The issue was beef tallow for fries, which they hadn’t disclosed to the public, and so vegetarians or people who don’t eat beef were mad. They could’ve solved the problem either by introducing an alternate or simple disclosure. But they were hardly “tricked.”
Beef tallow was standard practice for fryers, until it was mostly replaced with “vegetable oil”.
> vegetarians or people who don’t eat beef were mad.
I think you’re referring to the vegetarian who sued Buffalo Wild Wings for still using beef tallow in their fryers, even after the restaurant industry had mostly switched to industrial seed oils.
Part of the reputational risk at McDonald’s was that at the time they were heavily communicating that the standard items were standardized everywhere, so the revelation that US McDonalds used beef in fries did not go down particularly well in South Asia.
McDonald's was bullied into changing its fryer oil by Phil Sokolof [0], who himself was tricked into believing his 1966 heart attack was caused by saturated fat. This article says Sokolof paid for ads to bully McDonalds in 1988: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-01-22-op-1193-s...
I said McDonald's was 'tricked' in ~1990 into switching to vegetable oil. This was trickery both because the fries became less healthy (Omega-6 oils are inflammatory, etc), and less tasty. Malcolm Gladwell's podcast McDonald's Broke My Heart is about how the fryer oil switch made McDonald's fries soggy: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/mcdonald...
The 2002 article you linked to is about how vegetarians believed the switch to using seed oils as the fryer oil made McDonald's french fries compatible with their dietary philosophy. Those lawsuits were in the late 1990's or early 2000's, which was well after the 1990/1992 fryer oil switch.
Thanks for bringing up the early 2000's lawsuit against McDonald's by vegetarians - I was not aware of that. My point was that Ancel Keys' holy war against saturated Fat was an important part of the cascade of science-mistakes that resulted in the obesity epidemic which took off around 1980 (weight started inching up in the "post WWII" period, but didn't take off until ~1980).
