talking junk

The other day on the way back from a run at the botanics i chanced upon a poster ad at the bus stop for Burger King - they were for something called a BK Stacker. At the moment it had been an awfully long time since i had last eaten and it already was sevenish, which meant time for dinner. For a moment there i actually thought of stopping by the BK at PS on the way back to buy one. Good thing that by the time i got to PS and stood outside the BK there, i took another look at the poster featuring the Stacker situated in a prominent position right outside the restaurant, and thought "nah..." and went home instead.

Just to clarify what a BK Stacker is - it comes in three variants: the double, triple and quad stacker, these fancy monikers referring to the number of patties the burger has. And to complement each patty, the burger basically features a one to one ratio between patties, slices of cheese, and strips of bacon [which (though this is obvious, nevertheless deserves spelling out) meant that a quad stacker would fit between the bun halves four patties, four slices of cheese and four strips of bacon. I remember a time when A&W offered something called a Big Papa burger, which was proudly billed as the first burger in S'pore with three patties, and that i was highly intrigued that such an item could exist. Fast forward a decade or so and BK has made mincemeat (pun intended) out of the Big Papa.

I remember the Stacker being offered at the BK on the UNC campus and me trying it once - as big of an appetite as i have, i settled on a double - and felt absolutely and positively icky afters. Way too much burger (of too low a quality) there for me to take. And imagine if i were to feel that way after a double, how about a quad? And for that matter, how do people even open their mouths big enough to take a full bite out of one of them without dislocating their lower jawbone from its socket (as snakes apparently do when swallowing large prey whole)? That being said, unlike the Big Papa in S'pore, the appearance of this monstrosity of a burger there came as no surprise - the obesity endemic there is just beyond belief). And without a doubt, it is (relatively) low cost, low nutritional value, high fat, high sodium, high calorie (the quad apparently is worth all of a thousand calories), and of course, stomach-filling food like the Stacker that is literally feeding this problem.

I also have to make the disclaimer that i'm hardly an anti-fast food crusader - while i have resolved never to eat McD's ever again unless under gunpoint, i thoroughly enjoyed a thouroughly unhealthy burger/fried chicken etc whenever i had the opportunity to while in the States (cos there they have real good quality stuff there). I once ate twelve burgers (albeit mini fist-sized ones) in one sitting while at a dingy old White Castle. And for me the burgers at Sutton's on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill rank with the atas, oddly-named ieat superburger from Astons here as the best i've ever eaten. And i wouldn't hesitate to eat more of them, although the key of course is moderation. Yup so if to that end i'm hypocritical, then guilty as charged am i.

What does trouble me is that grossly oversized burgers have made their way to mainstream, heavily advertised fast food menus, which means that people here too will now have a higher tendency to sink their teeth into these thingies on a more regular basis. Not to be outdone by BK here, i saw an ad outside a McD's here today promoting their 'Mega Mac', which is nothing more than a Big Mac on steroids if you ask me (two extra patties). Is there really so much beef in the world that we can allocate so much of it to go into crap products like that? Of all the excuses for more methane-belching cows being farmed in this world, this is just about the worst one... If things continue along this vein, who's to say that we don't follow the footsteps (or make that footplods) of the US in time to come, not only in terms of obesity, but poor diet-related stuff like strokes, hypertension, cardiac arrests and the like... The whole just screams of excess - excess that we can pretty much do without when we put things into context and bear in mind the severe hunger problems that we've to deal with today...