Hotmail with your fries, sir?

By SIMON CALDER

Anyone who has ever been in a McDonald's restaurant will be familiar with being offered extras like fries and Coke. Now the global tentacles of the mighty Mac have extended to providing customers with access to the worldwide web.

The location is a corner of a foreign country: Kota Bharu, the last city on the east coast of mainland Malaysia before you reach the Thai border. I arrived here to research the real start of the War in the Pacific.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is depicted in the new film. But an hour earlier, Japanese land forces had come ashore at Kota Bharu at the start of an assault that ended with the capitulation of Singapore.

On my way to the War Museum, I did a double-take as I walked past McDonald's. A sign on the window of an otherwise unremarkable burger outlet promised McWeb access on the upper floor.

"We think it's the first one in the world," said Amir Aziz, who runs an impressive set-up of a dozen computer terminals. Access is as fast as the food downstairs. Travellers on the coast trail from the resorts on the Gulf of Thailand down to Singapore can keep in touch with home, and with each other, for 3 ringgit ($1.75) an hour.

Now, not only can you eat exactly the same fried food in Malaysia as in Manchester, Moscow and Manhattan, you also get computer chips with everything, enabling you to send McMessages to your mates or pick up McNuggets of travel information.

One more nail in the coffin of diversity or a handy addition to the traveller's repertoire? Whichever you decide, the Kota Bharu burger bar is a great tourist attraction.

Would you like a tour of the kitchens with that? This McDonald's turns out to be something of a fast-food theme park. Once I had finished erasing all the bulk mail that clogs up the average Hotmail account, I wandered down to the ground floor to find a group of Dutch tourists.

What, I wondered, were they doing hanging around in an air-conditioned McDonald's instead of exploring a beautiful country? "We're waiting for the Store Tour."

They were, too and so, I decided, was I. At 11 am sharp Rashid, the restaurant manager, welcomed us to a behind-the-scenes insight into the fast food industry. We began amid the stacked baskets of about-to-be-fries (processed potato, cooked in palm oil, heated to 190 deg C), and traced the evolution of the Big Mac meal.

Rashid was an entertaining host. When he found out I was British, he quickly pointed out: "There's no mad cow disease here - all our beef comes from New Zealand." Using a high-temperature grill, each patty is cooked from frozen in precisely 39 seconds.

Fast food is a multinational business in terms of supply as well as demand: McDonald's apple pies are imported from China. I didn't ask about the provenance of the mayonnaise, but the dispenser looked alarmingly like something a vet might use for artificial insemination.

The whole operation was clean, cheerful and clearly appreciated by the local people queuing up for a fast-food feast. For the price of a Big Mac (just $2.25 in Kota Bharu, compared with $6.45 in central London), you get an insight into a pervasive world.

I left in a quandary: visitors learn that any burger which has been standing, unsold for 10 minutes is thrown away. Not given away, nor eaten by the staff, but chucked out. In a hungry world, should a traveller who finds this practice distasteful buy the burger to save it from the bin, or steer clear of the fast-food chain to avoid funding further waste?