Press Articles - Rolling Stone 2
investigation last year, reporters from KCBS-TV in Los Angeles videotaped local kitchen employees sneezing into their hands while preparing food, licking salad dressing off their fingers, picking their noses and smoking while cooking. The teenage fast-food workers I met in Colorado Springs told me similar stories. Many workers would not eat the food unless they prepared it themselves. A Taco Bell employee said that food dropped on the floor was often picked up and served. An Arby's employee told me that one kitchen worker never washed his hands at work after doing engine repairs on his car. And several employees at the same McDonald's told me about a cockroach infestation in the milkshake machine and about armies of mice that urinated and defecated on hamburger rolls left out to thaw in the kitchen every night.
world domination the reunification of germany took place on October 3rd, 1990, eliminating the last traces of the communist regime that built the Berlin Wall. Two months later, eastern Germany had its first McDonald's. The coming of the American fast-food chain was not universally applauded. During one of the East German Parliament's last sessions, Ernst Doerfler, chairman of the environment committee, demanded a ban on "McDonald's and similar abnormal garbage-makers." The ban was never imposed. McDonald's chose the town of Plauen, located in rural Saxony, about halfway between Munich and Berlin, as the site of its first restaurant in the east. The town had been heavily bombed by the Allies during World War II, losing about seventy-five percent of its buildings. Decades after the war, unexploded bombs were still being found. Plauen seemed the quintessential East German town: sad and dreary, dirty and run-down, with aging factories, warehouses and textile mills. The McDonald's restaurant was the first new building erected there after the collapse of the Eastern bloc. Today, hundreds of McDonald's restaurants dot the landscape of eastern Germany. In town after town, statues of Lenin have been torn down, and statues of Ronald McDonald have popped up. One of the largest is in Bitterfeld, where a three-story-high illuminated Ronald McDonald can be seen from the autobahn for miles. When I visited Plauen last month, McDonald's was the only business open in the central market square. It was Reunification Day, a
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