"In an effort to burnish its tarnished image on Wall Street
and Main Street, McDonald's has formed a partnership with ... Paul Newman. Mr. Newman ... has agreed to sell McDonald's a line of salad dressing,
similar to the bottled dressing made by his company,
Newman's Own. Under the same philanthropic principle that
guides Newman's Own, Mr. Newman said, all after-tax profits
from the deal will be given to charity. ... The partnership does give an aura of wholesomeness to
McDonald's and its food, said the food and science writer
Michael Pollan, the author of The Botany of Desire: A
Plant's-Eye View of the World. 'All this is about buying the image of Paul Newman,' Mr.
Pollan said. 'McDonald's is in the hole. It is trying to
freshen and go upscale. It's redoing its flavor profile and
making it more sophisticated and giving it an aura of
health-consciousness and virtue, and this is a way to
connect with virtue. If McDonald's did what was politically correct, humanely
correct and nutritionally correct and sophisticated,' Mr.
Pollan said, 'if they did all those things, they wouldn't
be McDonald's.' "