Will McDonald's Have New and Healthy GMO French Fries?

Amazing. Marvelous. Wonderful. Fun. Those are four words that cannot be used to describe the last few weeks for McDonald's (NYSE: MCD ) , which has been criticized for having one of the least-compensated workforces in the country and recently announced a fall in same-store sales. If you thought it couldn't get any worse, you were wrong. The company is also being sucked into the vortex of bickering and conspiracy theories that has, unfortunately, become the debate over genetically engineered food products.

McDonald's isn't as despised as Monsanto (NYSE: MON ) for its business practices (not yet anyway), but now it, too, can have the same anti-GMO furor directed its way for its pending decision to utilize a genetically engineered potato for its french fries. While the GMO debate has been shown to boil down to a mistrust of science and generally pits consumer emotion against complex and misunderstood biotechnologies, there are major health and environmental benefits to using the new potatoes. That alone will be enough to sway McDonald's -- the world's largest potato buyer -- to utilize the new spuds.

Here's why.