Royally Spammed: A Fast Food Story


Today's blog post comes to you in epistolary form. A few days ago, I received an e-mail from the Burger King corporation entitled, "What Do You Love Most About Burger King's New Fall Menu?" 

A thought-provoking question deserved a comprehensive answer. This was my response:


Dear Burger King,

Wow, what do I love most about your new fall menu? That’s a tough one, but let me give it a shot.

First, before I gush over what you’re rolling out for autumn (can’t wait for those pumpkin spice cheeseburgers!), let me tell you what I love about Burger King in general.

As you know, burgers are actually small hunks of flesh that have been removed from unsuspecting cows (no worries, I’m told they’re almost always dead at that point), ground up, processed, and reconstituted into patty form.

Some people (and, I suspect, most cows) find that whole meat hacking business distasteful, but here is the genius of your marketing department. You took this bit of messy necessity and conjoined it with the idea of monarchy. Who doesn’t love kings? (Well, 18th century French peasants, I guess. But how much fast food were they really consuming?)

For me, nothing brings me closer to that world of courtly glamor and intrigue than chowing down on a Whopper, crown perched majestically on my head. Heck, sometimes I wear the crown long after the dining experience. I’ve been known to mow my lawn decked out in your finery. (Note from experience: crown not recommended in the shower.) Have you considered some sort of disposable paper cape to go with it? Just spit-balling.

Burger King. Close your eyes and say it couple of times out loud, slowly. Let it roll off your tongue. It’s got nice mouth feel, doesn’t it?

And how many folks out there know about your environmental stand? “What?” the doubters would say, “Burger King, environmentally friendly?” Yes indeed. Look at the bright orange and yellow you’ve chosen for your company colors. Aside from traffic cones and police tape, those hues normally never leave the crayon box. Most kids prefer the boring blues, purples, reds and greens, so guess where the orange and yellow crayons end up? Yep: the trash heap.

So thank you, Burger King. Recycling the ugly hues is your way of saying, “By golly, we’re better than a landfill.”

As for the fall menu, I confess I haven’t had a chance to examine it as closely as I want to. But whatever you’ve dreamed up, I hope lots of mayo is involved! I know some traditionalists out there are turned off by Burger King’s liberal use of la mayonnaise. (It’s a French word, which automatically says classy, but I’m sure your marketing people knew that.) But this is the modern age we’re living in, and mayo is the grease that oils the wheels of progress!

Besides, what doesn’t taste better with a layer of something slippery slathered on top? From your onion rings to your breakfast CROISSAN’WICH (more French! Trés chic, Burger King) to your intriguingly named Chicken Fries and your Dutch Apple Pie, mayo is the secret sauce that adds that Henry the Eighth level of luxury we’re all striving for.

So thank you for giving me the opportunity to share my thoughts with you. And let me say that I for one, salute you—nay sir, I bow to you—the Burger King.

PS. Please remove me from your mailing list.


Check out Robb’s new book and more 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Robert Frost Quandary, or How Irrational Thinking Might Save Your Life

Image
You stumble out of the wilderness, having had no contact with humans for at least ten days. You’re weak from hunger and fatigue and you find yourself at a crossroads, power lines stretching out along each of the separate roadways. It’s decision time. You think about Robert Frost’s poem, and wonder if his advice to take the road less traveled might not just lead to your demise. What do you do, or more importantly, which brain system should you use to make this crucial decision? Daniel Kahneman, famed psychologist, winner of the Nobel prize for prospect theory and author of Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow might be the one guy to call, assuming your existential crossroads gets cellphone reception. Kahneman explains that we have two systems for making decisions. He refers to them simply as System 1 and System 2. System 1 is reflexive, automatic, and impulsive. It takes a constant reading of your surroundings and generates short-term predictions, all operating on a level beneath yo
Read more

Who Are You: Does Personality Change as We Age?

Image
Are you the same “you” that you were twenty years ago? Thirty? Forty? What about fifty years ago? While science still struggles to quantify, measure, and categorize personality, some have a different question: how stable is personality in the first place? Do the high school version of yourself and the retiree version of yourself still have some common immutable core? It depends how you look at it , says a paper by lead author Rodica Damian of University of Houston and her co-authors Marion Spengler of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, Brent W. Roberts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and UH grad student Andreea Sutu. The paper in question goes by the catchy title “Sixteen going on sixty-six: A longitudinal study of personality stability and change across 50 years.” Damian and her colleagues compared the results for 1,795 U.S. adults who had taken a personality test as teenagers and then again, five decades years later. The team found that yes, there is a
Read more

The Best Painkiller Isn't What You Think It Is

Image
When we say that listening to the right song makes us feel better, usually we mean it in terms of emotions. However, a new study from the University of Utah Health suggests that combining certain painkillers with certain music boosts the pain-fighting effect of the medication a measurable amount. This recent bit of research was conducted specifically on models recreating two types of pain: inflammatory and post-surgical. (Nerve pain, or neuropathic pain, was not addressed.) Low doses of four medications were explored: ibuprofen, cannabidiol, levetiracetam, and NAX 5055. As for music, the researchers went with one artist only, while the control groups were given one of the four drugs and subjected to white noise. What music would you choose for optimal painkilling effect? The experimenters went with Mozart. (Interestingly, the phrase “Mozart therapy” already exists, referring to the beneficial effect ol’ Amadeus can have on patients with epilepsy. For instance, a 2018 st
Read more