Fathers, best be locking your daughters up, lest they end up dating a fast food mascot:
RAD OMEN - “Rad Anthem” from Nicholaus Goossen on Vimeo.
Haven’t decided if the mountains of coke or the stripper wearing a chicken mask giving a lap dance to Colonel Sanders was more disturbing.
Mental Floss keys us into little known menu items that your favorite fast food stop may not be advertising:
McDonalds - its synomous with the American Way. Right up there with Fourth of July and Apple Pie. Except that now they’re making some of their patties with beef shipped in all the way from New Zealand. That’s one hell of a carbon foot print.
One of the best things about Portand is a spate of 3-4 blocks in the middle of downtown that are lined with food carts. Amazingly varied food carts that cook up everything from falafel to thai to pasta for the type of prices you would expect to pay, at well, a cart.
Portland Food Cart
In fact, the Portland Food Carts are so well established and so beloved by the city, that there is an entire blog dedicated to the carts, Food Carts Portland. While no city has as an extensive network as Portland, food carts and trucks are making a come back across the country. LA has over a dozen trucks that roam the city, announcing their locations via twitter and serving up everything from BBQ to cupcakes to sushi. NYC of course has their own set of food trucks and of course and endless supply of hot dogs/roasted nuts/breakfast fare carts across the city. Even lowly DC has a few food trucks of its own.
There’s all sorts of reasons why food trucks and carts should be making a comeback - volatile real estate market, a crashed out economy, and a modern society that no longer has the time or the know how to cook all points to MORE FOOD TRUCK.
1) This looks like it would be incredibly messy to eat.
2) I do not approve of chicken-on-beef action.
Meet KFC’s Double Down sandwich, where even the bun is made of chicken.
Not sure if this is real or not, but if you weren’t already terrified of the Happy Meal fare, this will do it.
Food trucks are hot on the scene in LA. Will only be days till Paris Hilton/Lindsay Lohan is snapped in line for a Kogi Roja taco. Fast food on the move…
Fun food site of the moment: www.fancyfastfood.com. Check out the amazing food reinventions, including where they turn:
into this:
I’ve heard this mentioned in passing before, and couldn’t quite believe my ears. Industrial food producers reamove the chewiness from food items so that your grub goes down faster and encourages you to pig out more. I think “Adult Baby Food” is an apt term.
There’s a proposal in Nassau County, New York to tax fast food items an extra 2%. The new tax is projected to bring in $12 million for the county next year should it be enacted. They have a very complicated system to determine what constitutes fast food:
He defines fast-food restaurant as “any franchised outlet of a restaurant chain that derives 30 percent or more of its revenues from the sale of prepared, ready-to-eat food, and which serves one or more menu items that contain more than 0.5 grams of trans fat or 5 grams of saturated fat per serving.”
The one or more menu item definition is a little odd. By this definition, the tax would able to things like apple sslices and salads as well as big macs. Of course, some of those salads can pack in a scary amount of fat. The good thing is it would not apply to small independent non-chain restaurants, like you local pizza shop. Still the focus primarily centers on fats and not sugar or sodium. If the goal was to apply a sin tax like alcohol, then shouldn’t the tax be on any food that harbors more than say 20% of fat, sugar, and/or sodium?
This is kinda sad. The lowly, forgotten single patty hamburger is actually the menu item with the least number of calories at McDonald’s. At 250 calories and 9 grams of fat, the burger far undercuts even the filet-o-fish sandwich, my go to when forced into a McDonald’s situation, which weighs in at 380 calories and 18 grams of fat.
The worst offender is the surprising Triple Thick Chocolate Shake at a whooping 1160 calories and 27 grams of fat. As Lifehacker notes:
Not only is the Triple Thick Shake the only drink bad enough for you that it merited inclusion in the top five worst foods at McDonald’s, but it’s worse for you than just about anything else they offer. If you wanted to recreate the artery and waistline pounding excess of a large Triple Thick Shake, you’d pretty much have to take a stick of butter, pour 80 Pixie Stix on it, and hit it with a salt shaker before eating the mountain in front of you with a spoon.
And it’s at the drive through.
Got to admit, they had me at “and we’ll have two taco salads for our senoritas”.
Fun food site of the moment:
These guys are going places, and they are aiming high. As they say at the bottom of the site:
This is an ongoing Pulitzer-caliber project. Check back for updates!
JayInPortland links to a great article by Dan Neil at the LATimes about the sexualization of food. Because nothing says sex like a fatty, greasy, dull gray, flabby burger patty larded up with Bacon! and condiments. Using sex to sell any item will leave many women feeling slightly slimy and used, but using sex to sell food is kinda like have a quickie with Karl Rove and him leaving crumbs and bbq sauce in the sheets.
And its becoming more prevalent. Witness the new Carl, Jr. ad with Top Chef’s Padma. The don’t-mess-with-me food judge hikes up her skirt, pops-a-squat and gorges herself with a 700 calorie monstrosity called the Western Bacon CheeseBurger, suggestively licking away the sauce from various parts of her body.
Neil had this to say about the advertising agency that came up with the soft porn spot:
All future correspondence to Mendelsohn Zien and Applebaum should be addressed to the Eighth Circle of Hell.
I cannot pretend to be offended by these ads. Young men are coarse, callow, emotional imbeciles with suicidal dietary habits. In other words, from a marketing perspective, these ads are perfection itself, practically verite. Meanwhile, if I put on my magic deconstructing spectacles, I can see neo-feminist subversion in these messages. Note the tagline of the Padma Lakshmi commercial: “More than a piece of meat.” This was the cri de coeur of feminism back in the day, and though it refers to the burger, it is also a tweak of conscience to males slobbering over the accomplished actress-author-chef. Take that, you objectifying pig.
The trend of intermingling sex and food will only get worse as the fast food and HFCS industries desperately thrash around, looking for the ever elusive next customer that is stupid enough to ingest their poison. As we mentioned in the post about the Heart Attack Grill:
This combination of sex-sells and death-defying heroism are clearly aimed at red-blooded American men dying to prove how manly they really are. But is scarfing down enough fat to make your arteries seize up mid-meal really what Americans think makes you a tough guy? Sadly, the Heart Attack Grill patrons seem to think so.
Looks like they found their perfect victim in young men who think with body parts other than their brains and their stomachs.