TIL that in 2020, Burger King ran an advertising campaign featuring a picture of a moldy Whopper, to prove that their burgers are made without preservatives. This unconventional advertising method worked, increasing sales by 14% (according to multiple sources.)

  • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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    2 months ago

    Back as a teenager, I worked at several fast food joints. Out of them all, BK was the least bullshitty behind the scenes. Everything cooked right, strict keep times, and reliable cleaning schedules. Some of that is franchise dependent, but corporate BK at the time pushed hard on that stuff.

    Never worked McDonald’s, I had beef (pun intended) with the manager of the only one close enough to have worked at.

    Wendy’s, I didn’t stay long because I had my certification as a nurse’s assistant and bailed immediately for the first job offer doing that.

    Hardee’s was decent in the back. Not as intensely pushed for cleaning schedules for damn sure, and the hold times for food were longer, but the food quality compared to most places was high in terms of making sure things were the way they are supposed to be. The fried chicken was timed right, the biscuits very precisely timed for the right doneness, that kind of thing.

    With Hardee’s more than any of the others, when you came in determined how good the food would be. You want good biscuits, you damn well better be there within an hour of opening. Chicken was reliable until an hour before closing, after that you were rolling dice. But the more typical fast food was usually fine all day.

    All of which is tangential, but I figured you might get a kick out of it, Don.

  • Silverseren@fedia.io
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    2 months ago

    I really don’t understand the people who fearmonger about preservatives. Do you want food to go bad? Preserving things in salt and other methods are as old as cooking itself and are responsible for feeding people around the world in horrible famine times.

      • Silverseren@fedia.io
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        2 months ago

        Sure, there’s plenty of preservatives we don’t use anymore because there are way healthier alternatives. But there’s also plenty of anti-science people who fearmonger about any and every preservative despite knowing nothing about its chemistry or even any claims of harm.

    • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      I mean, there’s arguments where that’s a good thing. Depends on who’s doing the eating, and who’s wanting the ingredients to change.

      Me? I’m of the mind that the problem would be one of false advertising, as they have often used beef as a term, and in most places with English as a frequent or dominant language, beef means cow meat.

      When it comes down to it, meat is meat. Kangaroo has benefits and drawbacks to its husbandry, resource usage to get to market, and in cooking. Beef has all those points that vary, as do any livestock.

  • tpihkal@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    That would be soo disgusting to see if you’re hungry, but I can say, not having seen it before, it will certainly have a lasting impression on me.

    Now I just need to know if Burger King has actually rid their products of artificial stuff.

  • DoctorButts@kbin.melroy.org
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    2 months ago

    When I was in grade school, a motivational speaker showed everyone a McDonald’s burger that he had purchased an obscenely long time ago. He had it in a plastic bag and it still looked brand new.

    I still ate McDonald’s though. Lol. Well, up until the last few years when fast food suddenly became an exclusive luxury for the 1%.

    • Don_Dickle@lemmy.worldOP
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      2 months ago

      Holy shit I thought only my school had motovation speakers…I swear had to go to assembly every two or three months to hear some bullshit they were peddling.

      • Chozo@fedia.io
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        2 months ago

        We had a bunch of them when I was growing up. Some of them were cool, and were just talking about pursuing the arts and stuff. Some were annoying propagandists, trying to convince children that war is dope and that they should enlist. But some of the anti-drug ones were fucked up.

        I distinctly remember this one speaker who told us this long, depressing story about how addiction caused him to become so poor that he had to steal food and toilet paper for his family, that he had to break into people’s homes to steal their valuables to buy more drugs, that he spent 20 years in the prison system before finally getting out and getting sober and making something of his life… Then after like 30 minutes of this story, he says “None of that actually happened, but it COULD have, if I gave in to the temptations of marijuana.”

        And I was only like 9 or 10 at the time, but even then I was old enough to recognize when my intelligence had been insulted. This man sat there and pulled at our heartstrings for a full half hour, literally making some of the kids cry because of how sad and traumatic his story is, only to reveal that he was lying straight to our faces. But, we should totally trust him that drugs are bad, even though the only thing we know about this man is a lie.

        On the bright side, I came out of that experience as a better critical-thinker, and with a fresh sense of skepticism that I’ve carried with me through life. But I still like drugs, sooo…

        • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          The anti-Marijuana lies told to schoolchildren are, in my opinion, directly responsible for many of those kids falling to meth and heroin addiction. “Well, if they obviously lied about weed, they probably lied about how bad all the other ones are too”.

      • DoctorButts@kbin.melroy.org
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        2 months ago

        I thought they were common, though I am old AF, so maybe it doesn’t happen as much anymore. Was pretty common from grade school all the way through high school.

        Felt like the same for me: every 2-3 months, there was a big assembly in the gym and we got to skip out on class for an hour or two while someone talked at us kids. I don’t know how much info I’ve actually retained from those assemblies. I remember McDonald’s burger guy, one time someone brought in a giant harmless snake and we all got to touch it, and one time there was a former pro wrestler who ripped a phone book in half lol.

        • alteredracoon@lemm.ee
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          2 months ago

          I remember one that came to my elementary school was a yoyo professional or something. Got the entire school hooked on yoyos haha. This would’ve been mid 2000’s.

          • Wwwbdd@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            During the whole yo-yo craze, did you accidentally break the classroom’s fishtank with a yo-yo, landing you a month’s worth of detention? During a detention session where the teacher is not present, you rummaged through her desk for your yo-yo and discover personal ad written by the teacher, ultimately deciding to respond to it as a prank?