Given the popularity of books and movies like Fast Food Nation and Super Size Me, as well as the countless number of snarky comments about them on parenting blogs and forums everywhere, it seems McDonald’s is losing favor with the new generation of parents. And the fast food giant aims to do something about that:

McDonald’s has equipped six mothers with laptop computers to record their impressions of its operations over the next few months. The moms were chosen by an independent company from a group of 4,000 applicants, and the blogs and journals will be posted “unedited” beginning June 20 on McDonald’s home page, where it hopes to attract other moms interested in seeing the comments, officials said last week.

The women will be given full access to a restaurant’s operations, will tour a hamburger plant, and even take a trip to an orchard that supplies McDonald’s popular french-fry-alternative apples. (No word on a visit to the sweet, sticky caramel factory.) It seems one of their main goals is eliminating the misconception that everything served hot has made a trip through the microwave:

“One of the most important things I learned is that McDonald’s prepares their food fresh, and I was told the food has a shelf life. So, if your local store is following the proper procedures, you shouldn’t be getting mushy Filet-O-Fish patties or dried-out hamburgers,” [participant] Fitzpatrick-Hughes wrote as part of her first journal entry that will post Wednesday.

Of course this latest PR blitz will do nothing to sway the McDonald’s is evil crowd, but will reading other mom’s accounts of McDonald’s background scene be enough to lure on-the-fence parents back into Ronald’s loving and heart-stopping embrace?

Maybe McDonald’s next move should be to go the full disclosure route and admit that most of their menu falls far out of the realm of “healthy”, but with moderation and an overall balanced diet, an occasional Happy Meal or Big Mac Attack certainly isn’t anything to get worked up about. Now that’s a campaign I can get behind.

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Who would win? The sensible mom or the one with long nails? My bets are on the MILF, just as I would play my odds against any creature who dare distrupt our cat’s grooming (she’s not real friendly to begin with). As with the MILF vying over a parking space, it’s the claws that I worry about.

Word on the street tells me that mini-vans are on the decline. Could it be that today’s fashion conscious mom is ditching practicality for status? Not quite. See, today there are many different options in cars, with cross-overs and station wagons making a comeback, practicality can be had without having to give up on style.

From an AP source published on the HeraldNet:

Of the 14 minivans on the market, sales have dropped on all but the Honda Odyssey. Sales of half the vans are down by more than 20 percent compared with the first eight months of 2005.

Ford Motor Co., which is getting out of the minivan business, predicts that 2006 sales will drop below a million for the first time since 1992.

“I acknowledge that as a vehicle design, the minivan has a lot of very positive attributes,” said George Pipas, Ford’s U.S. sales analysis manager. “There’s a problem, though. A lot of vehicles have a lot of very popular attributes.”

He’s referring mainly to car-based “crossover” vehicles, glorified station wagons such as the Ford Freestyle, GMC Acadia and Hyundai Santa Fe that carry as many people as minivans but have sleeker styling without the soccer mom label. Pipas said about 40 crossovers, many with three rows of seats, are now on the market and the number of crossovers will rise to more than 70 by 2009.

Plus, there’s that soccer mom stigma created by Generation X, the people who followed baby boomers.

“Gen X no more considered a minivan than most people would consider eating soap,” said Art Spinella, president of CNW Marketing Research, an automotive research firm in Oregon.

Plus, when $30,000 will buy you this Honda Odyssey minivan (from Honda’s official website), it may be wise to check out other options as well. You can get a practical vehicle that says more than, “I’m a mom”. So, would you rather get this:

Or this Honda Pilot, for around the same price:

Or this Audi A3 Compact Station Wagon, again, for around the same price? Hmmm….?

…because I don’t care what anybody says, there is no possible way to look good in a minivan. My husband and I have refused to cave, because a minivan is an admission that you are a suburban housewife/breadwinner who lives to cart children around and eat McDonald’s. (That’s always my first impression anyway….no offense to those of you who love your vans, I’m sure there are plenty of exceptions, it’s just the stigma associated with it).

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