The New Bacon Whopper With Kindness

Now that fast food joints have discovered public health - or more accurately, they've discovered that the public wants to lie to itself more convincingly about it's own health - different companies are taking different approaches to the problem.

McDonald's, for instance, has risen to the challenge by introducing a new product, apple slices (which comes with sugary caramel dip), and they've slapped pictures on their packaging of young, athletic people skipping though the air - images taken in the years, I guess, before they were diagnosed with heart disease. Burger King has taken the opposite approach, recognizing that people eat fast food out of a sheer obstinate disregard for healthy behavior. They have introduced the most ludicrous products imaginable - triple Whoppers with bacon, omelets that come with sausage, bacon, ham, cheese and cream gravy - a greasy middle finger thrust skyward in the face of nutrition and common sense. Their commercials feature a creepy plastic Burger "King" - a sadistic figure who snares American eaters with their own gluttonous lack of restraint.

Now Burger King has gone the other way on the issue of animal cruelty. In the months ahead they will be switching to vendors who do not cage the chicken and swine from which the above-mentioned omelet might be created. The sausage once roamed, so to speak, and the chicken which laid your breakfast biscuit sandwich was given a name and treated thoughtfully in the years before it's demise. (Cows, as of this writing, are not on the list.)

Bottom line - the livestock, in many cases, probably received more exercise in it's brief pre-slaughter existence than the tubby American who crammed it down the hatch on his or her way to a sedentary job. It's okay, somehow, to offer products that are the health equivalent of a gastrointestinal atom bomb - but we wouldn't want any our furry pals to suffer in the production of the foodstuff in question. And other fast food companies are bound to get in line with similar plans.

Would you like a side order of irony with that?

Tags: Burger King, Public Health