When Fast Food Fights

Burger King’s newest ad campaign, a pseudo-scientific documentary featuring the world’s last “hamburger virgins” as they compare the taste of Big Macs to Whoppers, has drawn media fire—perhaps because the whole idea is so silly, embarrassingly extravagant, and blandly devious. For readers who haven’t seen the ad, it features villagers in Northern Thailand, Greenland and Romania graciously receiving their first taste of that icon of American food—the hamburger.

Apparently, the intellectual authors of this tasteless taste test were unaware that they were going dumb in the midst of a global food crisis. While they spent millions of dollars happily tracking down people with no “hamburger awareness” the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has to go begging because they can only get one thirtieth of the money they need to rebuild the developing world’s shattered food systems. Though Burger King studiously avoided doing taste tests with poor villagers, hunger and poverty are very real in the countries they visited. Hunger is also a reality here in the United States where 36 million people are “food insecure” (that’s USDA-speak for “hungry”).

The fast food industry depends on giant polluting feedlots that consume 70 percent of the world’s grain and are filled to bursting with animals strung-out on steroids and hormones.

When we look behind the hamburger hype, what seems like good, clean, inter-cultural fun is neither good nor clean nor much fun. The fast food industry depends on giant polluting feedlots that consume 70% of the world’s grain and are filled to bursting with animals strung-out on steroids and hormones. The lettuce and the tomatoes for much of the fast food industry are harvested by men and women working under what Representative Barney Frank has called “slave or near-slave labor.” In Florida, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has been campaigning for years for a 1-cent per pound increase in wages. Small wonder Burger King didn’t ask them to participate in the taste test—oh, that’s right, they are too hamburger literate. In fact, they could probably write volumes about fast food.

Whopper Virgins is not about friendly, exotic people dressed up in their traditional Sunday best as they experience the joy of scarfing down 360 calories of fat. It is about getting us to consume even more than the 270 lbs of meat we average a year as Americans. Is this the industry’s response to “Super-sized Me”? Why compete to promote the over-consumption of fast food when one in six American kids are already obese and type 2 diabetes is going up at a rate of 4.6% a year?

The irony of this fast food fight is that no matter which burger comes out on top, the result is the same. When McWhopper wins—we lose.