The fast-food industry has had a bad couple of years. Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease has tainted the burger’s image, avian flu threatens fried chicken and the remorseless expansion of the Anglo-American butt makes one think twice about that 60cm pizza.
At the end of the big multi-national franchise chains are some of the richest people in the world. Since they are American, they are also some of the most charitable people in the world. All that wealth slurps back down — 1 000 points of lard, as George Bush Snr would say.
Last week it was reported that Joan Kroc, widow of the founder of the McDonald’s empire, left $1,5-billion — the bulk of her personal fortune — to the Salvation Army. Forget soup kitchens. Sally Ann will probably be listed in the Good Food Guide next year, with Wolfgang Puck banging a tambourine as the street people tuck in to their coquilles St Jacques and Pouilly Fuisse.
Kroc (about 20 years younger than her husband, who died in 1984) also left a handsome $200-million to National Public Radio (NPR) — the not-for-profit organisation that puts out the United States’s equivalent of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
It was, the stunned manager of NPR claimed, ”the largest monetary gift ever received by an American cultural institution”.
For a super-rich American, Kroc was surprisingly leftish in her political views.
She supported Mend (Mothers Embracing Nuclear Disarmament”) and founded a Joan B Kroc ”international peace foundation” at Notre Dame University (a paltry $70-million or so).
But for all her public philanthropy, Kroc looked after the pennies in her purse. One blogger recalled, bitterly, on reading of her demise: ”She had me dismissed as a games supervisor at the Mirage casino in 1992 because she complained that I let her bet over her limit playing blackjack. All her money was returned to her by the casino and I was let go. Thank you, Joan; you were truly a philanthropist.”
And what of the ketchup we smear, so lavishly, over our burgers and fries?
Like Ray Kroc, HJ ”Jack” Heinz II (1909 to 1987) was survived by a young, philanthropic, fabulously rich widow. Drue Heinz, who spends much of her time in the United Kingdom, has been notably generous to that country. The London Library is in her debt; she has endowed a chair of American studies at Oxford; she stipends literary prizes, gives generously to British museums and has discreetly supported British writers in need for decades. I have never met her, never even seen a photograph of her. She is not listed in Who’s Who or any other top persons’ directory I can find. But she is, I think, a remarkably good top person.
I never up-end a bottle of ketchup (why is it so difficult to get the first dollop out, Drue?) without a little murmur of gratitude to Mrs Heinz.
The giving habit is ingrained in Americans not because they are more generous by nature than us skinflints but because their enlightened tax code encourages charity. It’s not just rich Americans, like the Krocs and Heinzes, who give: Howard Dean’s presidential campaign is fuelled by $100-or-less donations, all tax-deductible.
Americans give their clapped-out cars to charity and deduct the full blue-book price on their tax returns. Charity pays. — Â