A mural painted by art-activist Louis Michel has McDonald’s Penge franchisee threatening legal action.
The Cow in Penge
Michel is an accomplished street artist whose work has appeared around the world. On the morning of Saturday 7th June Michel put paint to wall, installing a magnificently decorated cow on the side of a single storey building on Penge High Street. The six-foot high cow sits regally atop of a burger bun, complete with a lettuce leaf, a tomato slice and a layer of melting cheese. The animal looks out over an adjoining McDonald’s outlet. Next to the cow, Michel wrote ‘I’m not lovin’ it’ – challenging the chain’s banal marketing slogan.
Life is Cheap
McDonald’s doesn’t report on how many beef burgers it sells in the UK but the chain is believed to serve an average of 3.5 million customers per day. Its main burger processing plant, OSI Food Solutions, is in Scunthorpe and sources beef from more than 16,000 farmers. It’s a secretive place but here is what we know of its operations – the facility ‘processes’ approximately 350,000 cows a year, or an average of 1,000 a day. The newly delivered beef is ground down, and fresh and frozen beef are mixed to help bind the meat, which is run through a patty-making machine capable of producing 1,200 burgers every minute. The patties are frozen and packed into boxes by hand. The process from mincing to boxing takes approximately ten minutes. The patties are then delivered to the chain’s 1,400 outlets, where they are cooked in under two minutes. A single patty hamburger retails for £1.69. The average age of slaughtered cows in the UK is 23 months. Life is cheap at McDonald’s.
The Artist, the Vegan and the Book
I speak with Michel as he is travelling across France. He is busy with commissions and working on a forthcoming book. The decade-long vegan, whose parents ran a successful gastronomic restaurant, is now leveraging his observational and artistic skills to highlight society’s hypocritical relationship with animals.
“We hate on certain nations for eating dogs, yet we are happy to chow down on a dead cow. I find that hypocritical” says Michel. He has a valid point.
Michel knows food – more so, he understands our relationship with food, including the myths and convenient ‘untruths’ we tell ourselves to excuse our cruel behaviours and murderous practices when it comes to confining, slaughtering and consuming animals.
“I’m currently working on a book, which will be a fusion of plant-based recipes supported by artworks that highlight our unhealthy fetish with eating animal flesh.”
Michel goes on to explain that the artwork for the book is meant to arrest and interrupt, to get us to re-think what we consider as ethical food. Michel is someone who thinks in cinematic frames that are as expansive as his ideas. And for the 350,000 dead cows that are slaughtered, sold, and consumed under the golden arches, Michel found the perfect canvass – a wall in Penge opposite a 24-hour McDonald’s.
“The paintings that I’ve done in South London, including the Penge cow, will be in the book, and they will be supported by a series of recipes which switch out animal flesh for plant-based alternatives.”
Provocative but not Offensive
Michel is a fast worker and by the Saturday afternoon his decorated cow was complete. Equally fast was McDonald’s, whose franchise manager put fingers to keyboard and fired off a threatening note asking for the removal of the artwork’s lettering, or legal action would follow. They never mentioned the cow directly, although they did call the creation ‘offensive.’
“I don’t think it’s offensive, provocative perhaps, but not offensive” said Michel about the McDonald’s claim.
“McDonald’s said two things: I’d used the trademark logo, and they deemed the piece offensive, which is ironic because essentially, it’s a beef burger, exactly what they sell. Also, I very purposely didn’t replicate their trademark logo. I adapted it so that it was different enough that they couldn’t press charges” continued Michel.
McDonald’s is no stranger to using lawyers to threaten and bully, having initiated the UK’s longest running libel case. The case primarily centred on a leaflet (What’s Wrong with McDonalds – everything they don’t want you to know) which was distributed by campaigners to McDonald’s customers. The claims, the fast-food chain said, were wrong and misleading. In June 1997, Mr Justice Bell found defendants Helen Steele and David Morris had libelled McDonald’s in regard to some of the claims, but critically Bell found McDonald’s ‘culpably responsible’ for cruelty to animals. (In a bizarre footnote to this episode, a 2013 book written by Guardian journalists, Paul Lewis and Rob Evans, would assert that the leaflet was written by undercover police officer Bob Lambert).
Permission and Buffing
Michel had permission to paint on the McDonald’s facing wall.
“So, there are several ways in which art appears in the public domain. The first is when it’s illegal, someone just rocks up, does the painting and leaves. The second is where you go and knock on the door and ask the owner or the person subletting the space if you can do a painting on the wall. The third, the one that has progressively taken over many cities around the world, is where you’ve got a local facilitator, who gets permission and then makes those spaces legally available to artists. That’s what happened in Penge.”
Michel continued: “It wasn’t a commission – I wasn’t getting paid. In fact, the opposite, it costs me to do these things. And likewise, the facilitator isn’t getting paid either. It’s essentially art for the public, for the community, and for the most part people just paint pretty pictures, but that’s not my manifesto as an artist. I like to provoke and to get people talking.”
The facilitator in Penge felt less confident. By Sunday morning they had buffed, or painted out, Michel’s ‘I’m not lovin’ it’ tag line. It appeared the 81-word email from McDonald’s had the desired impact. The Penge cow was silenced, robbed of her voice by a clown dressed in red and yellow and selling pieces of flesh for £1.69.
Approximately four million cows will be slaughtered in the UK this year. Most – but not all – will initially be stunned, then hung by a rear leg and while dangling have their throats slit. They will bleed to death. There is no such thing as a flesh-based happy meal, and I’m not lovin’ being told that there is.
I’m not alone. By Wednesday morning Michel’s art once again spoke truth to power, with new lettering reading: The Big Mac Man Censored Me!!!
Apparently, Michel was on his way to France on Wednesday.
—- ©2025 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer – Insta: @theafghanwriter
