Back a few years ago, when I was really rabidly anti-fast food, I enjoyed sending people to a site called “Fast Food, Ads vs. Reality.”
There, fast food ads were juxtaposed side-by-side with pictures of the same food, ordered from a fast food outlet. The results, you will not be surprised to learn, showed that the reality rarely resembled the advertising. To wit, a Burger King Whopper:
Now, another photographer has taken the same idea but ramped it up slightly — shooting the fast food in a studio and attempting to match the lighting and angles of the advertising. See what Dario D. has done with a Whopper:
There are many more on the website (appears to be down, Google cache here), but what I really appreciate is how the argument is ramped up rhetorically:
I happily pitch the idea that lawmakers are committing a crime against us people by allowing us to be continually insulted by this advertising, and consequently this pursuit of technical correctness, in defiance of human perception.
Ha! Indeed! There is also a comparison made between the advertised burgers and the box that they come in, which would be too small to fit them if they were actually they size as advertised.
I have chosen to highlight the Burger King Whopper because it was the last fast food hamburger that I ever ate, just over seven years ago. And that was an anomaly — I stopped eating McDonald’s in mid-high school, and most of the rest of the fast food burger chains didn’t last much longer. That Whopper, seven years ago, which didn’t sit all that right in me, was kind of a test.
Caveat: I do sometimes eat fast food fries, or even dessert, but even that is very few and very far between. I will also confess to a love of burgers in general, but I prefer to find them at cafes and diners.
Strange that I am still so perturbed by the false advertising, when it doesn’t affect me at all anymore.
(via Jezebel)
