Hush your mouth, I love the Haunted Mansion stuff.
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Did Maccas actually describe the challenge as creating âpalatableâ food? With the attendant silent assertion that their treatment is something else? Because thatâs some frank shit right there if they did.
The guy went from mainly eating the sorts of meals his vegan partner cooked to scoffing down a supersized meal including a quarter pounder with cheese. Youâre talking a meal that was not only huge, but loaded with salt and fat; both ingredients which will upset a stomach that is not acclimatised to them.
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I rarely eat McDonalds or fast food, maybe once every 1-2 months. However, there is something about conversations like this which produce a genuine urge to go eat their crappy food.
I honestly donât know what it is⌠Perhaps just thinking about their objectively gross and unhealthy manufactured food is enough to trigger my brainâs MOAR urges for it, even when the conversation is putting the food in a negative lightâŚ
I donât know⌠but damn, I could go for some peanut oil and kosher salt fries right nowâŚ
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Dominos Pizza here are running a promotion for their high-end pizza, and theyâre making a particular point of describing the ingredients as âresteraunt quality.â
Nice. but, uh, guys? What about your other pizzas? What the frack are they made of? /barf/
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Dominoâs made a splash a few years ago by reformulating their pizza, and publicly admitting they were doing it because it sucked so hard before.
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It also makes me wonder which one the US is stuck withâŚ
the beef dish is the only big offender. the others could mostly be made (minus the presentation and some seasonings) with the stuff that a normal McDonaldâs gets in the morning (not sure about the whole egg, but at least the tortilla espaĂąola could be made from egg mix). i think that should count.
McDonaldâs has every incentive to not serve dangerous (rotten, etc.) food, or even grosser-than-normal food, since one incident anywhere will possibly, through media and the internet, depress sales everywhere. The scope of that is almost mind-boggling, really.
And, indeed, food at McDonaldâs is pretty âsafeâ, if your only concern is to avoid immediate poisoning (i mean real food poisoning, not âsugar is a poison, omgâ nonsense). It wonât be good for you in the long-run (or if youâre adapting from a better diet), but statistically speaking, youâre safer for the day at McDonaldâs than almost anywhere else, including (probably) cooking at home, unless you are very meticulous in testing your ingredients.
You should google some of the anti-Spurlock sites, watch one of the reply movies, or even read the Wikipedia entry on Super Size Me. His film is basically pointless. The lunatic niche profit-seeking hack was eating 5,000 calories per day on average for a month. It doesnât matter if thatâs pink-slime hamburgers, filet mignon, or organic quinoa; that is going to screw you up, unless youâre training for the olympics.
I mean, he forced himself to eat even when he was feeling ill and nauseous (and even showed it in the movie), essentially force-feeding himself. Who even does that? What is he purporting to be âaccurateâ to? He was eating like someone with a serious mental disorder, and we already know those are dangerous.
(Yes, Iâve seen the movie. I enjoyed it enough while I was watching it, but over the next week or so, it got more and more irritating to me. Without being an alleged documentary, it would just be a guy physically and mentally damaging himself. Think about that. At least Jackass took some level of effort and training.)
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So what´s the message here? âAn accomplished chef who puts time and thought into it can actually make something reasonably edible out of the shit we´re serving. For the main dish however, he has to use raw ingredients (beef), because nobody should be subjected exclusively to our highly processed crap for a whole evening. Also, it goes without saying that this stuff is only for a select few people anyway, ther rest of you can continue eating crap for all we care. Enjoy your meal!â
The event was clearly for heavy investors and vips, so, yeah, thatâs about right. The negative buzz about McDonaldâs these days is that their food is intrinsically poisonous and ânot even food.â This is psy-ops to counter that perception for the âselect fewâ who attended, and assure them that McDâs is still a good investment: âquit bitching, I had McDonaldâs beef and itâs great, youâre just whining because youâre poor enough to eat hamburgers and not steak.â
The rest of us are getting advertisements with a similar strategy (not message; ads donât have messages. messages convey information.)
Judging from your nick, you probably know what you´re talking about.
Youâre surprised that a site that posts about Disney twice a day is posting about McDonaldâs? This isnât exactly a âhigh cultureâ blog.
The thing is, itâs not just any beef, itâs beef that is specifically raised to McDonaldâs specifications for making burger patties. I wish I could remember the name of the documentary that mentioned this (it wasnât Supersize Me), but a lot of food produced in the US tastes the way it does because large corporations like McDonaldâs create huge demand for very specific ingredients and the agricultural industry has developed around catering to those demands.
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Gather 'round while I tell you the tale of whence my sordid sobriquet.
Itâs from AD&D by way of Snoop Doggy Dogg. In the 1st ed. Monster Manual, one of the lower tiers of demons was described as having awful names like âBroken Tailâ and âDog Retchâ. My friends and I thought this was funny, and around this time, Snoop was making his debut (yeah, Iâm old). So, being what are now called âtweens,â we interpolated the demonic rapper Retch Doggy Dogg, and much laughs were had. It caught on, and the eventually the connection with Snoop faded, so it got shortened to âRetch Dog,â and became a sort of generic nickname with just a touch of ironic deprecation: âHey, Retch Dog, donât forget to bring your copy of the Playerâs Handbook,â and so on. Being mostly verbal at this point, and being used casually in a very specific way, the space was superfluous, and so: âretchdog.â
I eventually chose it as my general username because I was tired of the trying-to-be-cool handles I used in the BBS days (days which overlapped with the above, though I wouldnât dare have used it then). Itâs personal, but obscure, strange, and somewhat repulsive. Iâve wanted to tell this story, but also have been curious to see if anyone would ever make the connection with AD&D. However, a few people have recently made references to its literal meaning, so here we are.
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Itâs actually a complex socio-economic issue.
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I guess Iâm the only one who would have loved to take part in this challenge just to meet the host.
I laugh, only because we must be around the same age, and these sorts of shenanigans arenât isolated. Very good friends of mine had a band of minstrels that would show up in all those crazy D&D taverns full of adventurers.
Skull Thieves & Rhythym
Named, of course, after Bone Thugs and Harmony.
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I think his movie is mostly stupid, but his point â and the meaning behind the title â was that he got an item off the regular menu and then only âupgradedâ if he was asked, and he always accepted. That led to portions that were often way too big, as you pointed out, but that was also his point. You could choose to eat somewhat healthfully at McDonalds (and other fast food places), but they encourage you to buy more food for just a small amount more money.
Yeah, I agree, the upsell is vile. Itâs hard to not go for âmore!â I donât want to keep going on about this, but the âmust eat three meals a dayâ kinda kills that point. If you pigout at lunch, youâll feel awful for the whole day, but youâre definitely not going to be looking forward to cramming another bomb in your mouth at dinner. (shrug) According to wikipedia, he also only got offered to supersize a total of nine times; thatâs like ~200 extra calories per day on average.
Practically speaking, though, the value menu kinda self-sabotages their plot. Usually, the ounces-per-dollar on value-size things is pretty close to the large size, and itâs, of course, cheaper as an item.
added: maybe itâs because Iâm in a big city, but super-sizing is pretty expensive relative to the base cost. It doesnât feel like a small amount of money to me.
