Although I'm certain I have found many other commercials more viscerally irritating, I cannot recall a series of ads so obnoxious and insulting to the conscience as Burger King's recent "Whopper Virgins" ad campaign. These commercials are faux documentaries depicting villagers from isolated hamlets in places like rural Thailand and Romania. They are invited to chow down on Whoppers and Big Macs (neither of which they have ever tasted) and judge which one is best. Since this is a Burger King commercial, the vast majority of participants choose Whoppers (actually a less healthy selection than the Big Mac: with cheese, the Whopper has 770 calories, while the Big Mac has 560.)
In this self-proclaimed "pure" taste test, the "Whopper Virgins have spoken." (Or so reads the goofy tag line). Not only is this disgustingly condescending towards the Hmong, Romanians and Greenland Inuit (the three principal "Whopper Virgin" sample groups), it also sends precisely the wrong message at precisely the wrong time; if there is one thing the world needs now, it is for people to consume less fast food and unsustainably produced meat.
In "Whopper Virgins" (watch the extended ad at whoppervirgins.com), after the taste test results are in, the Burger King people (looking suspiciously like the people who conducted the non-biased taste test) fly into the communities on a helicopter -- with a genuine Burger King broiler in tow -- and begin to hand out burgers like mad. The Burger King people pretend they're totally going to help everyone with these cheap and efficient burgers, and they garnish their message of cultural cooperation by tasting some of the local food, which they deem to be just fine. The whole ad carries a phony subtext about how native cultures can coexist in the midst of mass-production and consumerism.
At the end of one such commercial, someone asks one of the Greenland Inuit men if he likes Whoppers or seal meat better. The line is said in this smug way, with a connotation that seems to whisper, "Would you rather eat gray, slippery meat with your fingers or this hearty American virtue food instead?" Although he answers "seal meat," contradicting Burger King's all-but-stated designs for global control, I suspect the ad director kept that segment in the video to let the educated viewer know that Burger King isn't there to destroy Inuit culture, just to test it for weaknesses.
It takes roughly 13 calories worth of plant food to produce one calorie of beef for consumption -- a ridiculously inefficient ratio. Yet every day, great tracts of rainforest are plowed to allow for the planting of cattle feed. While these grains could be used to feed the world's hungry, they are used instead to fatten cows. And this is just one way in which fast food destroys the ecosystem and keeps important nourishment from the impoverished.
As meat consumption around the world rises, we all must make an individual effort to cut down on our own intake of meat produced in factory farms. Even though I am a vegetarian, I would honestly rather see people hunt for their meat than buy a single Whopper or Big Mac. It is more humane to kill animals personally in their natural habitats, than to hypocritically allow them to be tortured in slaughterhouses while cowering at the act of bloodshed itself. Cows are castrated without anesthetic, pigs are loaded-up on massive levels of growth hormone until they are immobile and the nerve-filled beaks of chickens are clipped off. The whole process culminates with a slit throat or a bolt-gun to the temple.
The factory farming industry is also harming the climate. As a whole, the industry generates 40 percent more greenhouse gases than transportation, according to a recent United Nations report on climate change. That is roughly one-fifth of all greenhouse gases emitted annually. The industry pollutes our water sources with excess nitrogen from synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and tons of fossil fuels are burned to make these fertilizers and pesticides in the process. It is detrimental to every aspect of human, animal and environmental existence.
Burger King cannot be expected to think ethically about these issues. "Have it your way?" It is their way all the way.
None of these outrages can occur except for the consent of the public. The least that any of us can do to protect ourselves, our environment and other species from the deleterious effects of fast food is to simply refuse to buy anything from these goons.
