Revealed: How one Big Mac contains meat from 100 cows... McDonald’s shows burger’s journey from cow field to takeaway

• Four decades has passed since first McDonald's opened in South London
• Company has launched campaign to counter a range of McDonald’s ‘myths’ 
• Beef comes from mixture of breeds that spend summers outside on pasture
• UK McDonald’s says it only uses meat that is reared in Britain or Ireland
• Ex-dairy cows account for some 20 per cent of the total amount of beef used
• Firm says it is possible that any one burger could contain meat from more than 100 animals
• McDonald's customers said to consume up to 90 million Big Macs in a year 

By TOM RAWSTHORNE FOR THE DAILY MAIL

PUBLISHED: 22:04 GMT, 7 November 2014 | UPDATED: 00:18 GMT, 8 November 2014

Next week marks a very significant date in British gastronomical history: it’s the 40th anniversary of the day we fell in love with fast food.

Four decades have passed since the first McDonald’s opened in Woolwich, South London. 

It was quite an event - the mayor cut the ribbon and hundreds queued around the block to get a taste of the American culinary dream. 

But as with most love stories, the relationship between the British and McDonald’s hasn’t always run smoothly.

Having been hit in the late Nineties by the outbreak of mad cow disease, public sentiment in Britain also turned against the chain by the long-running, so-called ‘McLibel’ trial.

The company spent £10 million suing the activists Dave Morris and Helen Steel for what it said were defamatory claims made in leaflets the couple produced about McDonald’s and its business practices. 

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