Great story — McDonald’s is an interesting example. Seth Godin, Marketing extraordinaire, actually made these recommendation to McD’s in 2004:

“I have four irreverent ideas for McDonalds:

1. Start your own brand of lightly sweetened caffeine free iced tea. 10% the sugar of Coke. 4 times the profit. A brand you can own. A way to significantly impact the health of the world. Phase out Coke. Completely.

2. Offer a free DVD of the award-winning SuperSize Me! documentary with every iced tea sold.
[no, I’m not kidding].

3. Challenge every store to offer something new and real and local and remarkable on the menu. Diversify times 100.

4. Bend over backwards to host meetups in your stores. Keep up with the free wifi. Sponsor soccer teams and girl guides and the astronomy club. Put chess tables on the placemats. Use the real estate advantage to create a place where people meet.” See more here.

I like these ideas tremendously, because at the end of the day, I don’t know that we can make the McDonald’s of the world go away. So why don’t we take a page from Nature’s book and rather than destroying it, reclaim it. If we make an effort to rehabilitate the little tentacle of the global behemoth that lives in our neighborhood, by talking to the manager about alternative foods, by talking to our neighbors about nutrition, by reaching out to the people who can’t afford anything else and helping them find alternatives, by remembering that at the end of the day, what’s behind our food system is people, people who can be talked to, reasoned with, appealed to, then maybe it won’t be such a crazy proposition after all.