
Burger King’s new commercial shows the time-lapse decomposition of a Whopper - hawski
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/y3mn4x/why-burger-king-is-forcing-everyone-to-watch-a-moldy-whopper-rot
======
em500
The article already includes McDonald's response why its burger didn't
decompose (it dries out quickly due to its small size).

If you're skeptical, Serious Eats confirmed this in an experiment:
[https://aht.seriouseats.com/2010/11/the-burger-lab-
revisitin...](https://aht.seriouseats.com/2010/11/the-burger-lab-revisiting-
the-myth-of-the-12-year-old-burger-testing-results.html)

(A home-made burger of the same size tested under the same condition didn't
decompose either. The only thing you need to do to make either the home-made
or McD's burger rot is to make sure it doesn't dehydrate quickly.)

~~~
NTARelix
I performed a similar experiment in high school (~2007) but stored it in a
plastic bag. After a few months it smelled absolutely horrible so I wrapped it
in more bags and kept it hidden in an enclosed space. I decided to open it on
the final day of high school about 2.5 years later and to this day I can
recall the horrible smell and the texture. It has turned into a black slime as
if it had retained or even gained lots of moisture; completely unrecognizable
from its original form. Might be the worst smell I can remember to this day. I
always heard people say that McDonald's burgers don't decompose, but after
that experiment I never believed it because I had proven that it does
decompose.

That miscommunication wasn't apparent to me back then, but seems more relevant
than ever now. People often like to make bold claims without giving the
relevant context or even without actually understanding the context. I see
this all the time with news articles or videos making some claim, showing a
small bit of evidence, then the information spreads quickly through social
bubbles. If I decide to dig through the sources from which the article was
derived, I find that there's often a very important piece of context missing.
Whether that context was intentionally removed to twist a narrative or if the
context was overlooked is not always clear, but it makes it hard to trust so
many people and news articles today.

The best remedy for me so far has been to attempt to identify gaps in the
knowledge of the people and articles that I'm observing, then try to fill in
those gaps.

This article puts to rest my dissatisfaction with the simple claim that they
don't decompose because it reveals the primary difference in testing between
the conclusions formed by the 2 opposing experiments.

------
boublepop
I’m not in marketing sure. But this just seems textbook bad. My takeaway from
the add is that burger kings burgers are moldy and disgusting. They might say
all pr is good pr, but not when the pr is straight up making people associate
your edible product with something they would never in a million years eat.

------
norswap
It doesn't matter that people find the moldiness disgusting, as long as people
talk about it. Clever.

Also for all the fact that this is a stab at McDonalds, their decision to
rebrand to green more than a decade ago (in Europe, and maybe elsewhere?)
truly was prescient.

------
mbubb
I read one of Michael Pollen's books on food a few years back and the argument
is something along the lines of: "Eat real food, not too much, mostly plants.
Avoid 'edible food-like substances'." To my mind that is an argument against
something like "impossible burger" as a regular food.

A breakfast of a super-processed, vegan, organic waffle, soy egg replacement
and faux bacon is not much better for you than the pancake house originals. If
at all. Sometimes it is a fun social thing to get fast food or something off a
grease truck. More than once a week or so its not doing you very much good.

There is variety in diet - I find the whole genetic diet idea intriguing.
Though right now it is rife with pseudoscience. (I did geno-palate and found
it thought provoking.) Different things work for different people - but I
would bet Pollen's dicta are a pretty good base to start with and they
experiment from.

The cynical side of me things the BK campaign is probably bs. They will figure
out another way to give us cancer, heart disease and diabetes. But it is very
good to get us to think about what we all are putting in our mouths. Is it
really real?

~~~
Waterluvian
That quote sounds silly to me. What is real food? How much can you handle and
manipulate a food until its not real anymore? Can you grind it up and make
homemade burgers? Can you add a little bread crumbs to help it bind? Is bread
a real food?

~~~
matthewmacleod
I think the original quote is simpler: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly
plants." The essay from the NYT is a good read:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t...](https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html)

Now, Pollan broadly speaking does get a bit more into what constitutes "food".
But I'd argue in general: this is mostly a heuristic. It's not a clear set of
rules, because such a thing is likely impossible. And advice of this sort is
inherently kinda hand-wavy and (in Pollan's words) "flagrantly unscientific".

That doesn't mean it's useless as a guide – everyone will have a bit of a
different view on that. Bread, as something which has been consumed for tens
of thousands of years, is recognisable as food. It's got perhaps three
ingredients and is minimally processed. Cheese might be similar. Maybe it
could be as simple as "something you can reasonably make in your own kitchen",
or maybe it needs to be a bit more complex.

The point is – it's too easy to get caught up in litigating the precise
meaning of a vague phrase. The intent is clear, and the focus should be more
on general diet rather than the needless semantics of "does bread stop being
food when I make it into crumbs".

~~~
mbubb
Yes - you stated this better than I did. For me the idea of bread made with
"Enriched bleached flour" is a good example of 'deceptive' food where you
strip nutrients in one process and re-inject nutrients of questionable value.
So bread is a great example of a food which can go from empty calorie food to
dense nutrient.

------
thulecitizen
Inverting this: for many years Burger King and other fast food chains poisoned
people with non-nutritious food [1][2]. Now they want a pat on the back for
making nutritious food for the first time.

"“Consuming these preservatives has been shown to increase our risk of colon
cancer and should be limited in our diets,” she said."[3]

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1Lkyb6SU5U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1Lkyb6SU5U)

[2]
[https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/101/6/1251/4626878](https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/101/6/1251/4626878),
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6146358/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6146358/),
[https://blog.usejournal.com/the-united-states-has-an-
epidemi...](https://blog.usejournal.com/the-united-states-has-an-epidemic-of-
processed-food-and-its-killing-us-bb3a9a9a0547),
[https://flo.health/menstrual-cycle/lifestyle/diet-and-
nutrit...](https://flo.health/menstrual-cycle/lifestyle/diet-and-
nutrition/the-truth-about-fast-food-ingredients)

[3] [https://globalnews.ca/news/5792891/artificial-
preservatives-...](https://globalnews.ca/news/5792891/artificial-
preservatives-affect-health/)

~~~
wil421
You could at least put the whole quote from [3].

> Are artificial preservatives bad for you?

Some artificial preservatives, such as nitrites or nitrates used in processed
meats, have been shown to be bad for our health, Hnatiuk said.

“Consuming these preservatives has been shown to increase our risk of colon
cancer and should be limited in our diets,” she said.

However, others have been studied extensively and proven to be safe.

“It really just depends on the specific ingredient in question,” she
explained.

She goes on to say:

> “Under normal circumstances, if preservatives are only consumed in small
> quantities, they shouldn’t pose any health risk,” Lui said.

