Images via theartcollectors.com

Opening Saturday September 12th at the Last Rights Gallery in New York City is the exhibit "Pepto Dismal" by Jeff McMillan that offers a sinister vision of fast food icons. Note that their names are written backwards.

More photos »

Case in point: If KFC is going to make a Double Down Sandwich, why the fuck not make The Quadruple Down Sandwich?

Someone just give them a book deal please.

Photos via foodgeekery.com

The Double Down Sandwich is apparently an actual product at KFC: pepper jack cheese, Swiss cheese, and bacon smothered in the Colonel’s Sauce, using two Original Recipe Filets instead of buns. Foodgeekery has photo proof of it.

It's almost too crazy to be real — it's either an elaborate prank or corporate imagination run amok — but the photographs of the store signage and the commercial lend it an air of authenticity. Still, it's got nothing on the McGangBang.

More photos and the commercial »

Photo via thedartmouth.com

The smarty pants at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) in Lebanon, New Hampshire, have nixed fried foods in favor of healthier options for both staff and patients.

Neighboring West Lebanon Hospital resident John Hughes thinks the fried food ban is a good idea, stating, “People have been eating fried food for years, and they all end up dying of heart attacks.”

Keep reading »

Photo: wsacc/Flickr

From time to time we like to know what's going on inside the heads of the people who actually make the news in the world of food. Here, Matt Lewis of New York's famed Baked bakery (and author of the cookbook of the same name) weighs in on his curiosity — and frustration — with everyone's freaking Chick-Fil-A obsession.

My friend, who is the kind of girl that logs and photographs almost everything she eats, recently shot me an enthusiastically all-caps email: DONT FORGET TO SAVE ROOM FOR CHICK_FIL-A AT THE ATLANTA AIRPORT. This is the kind of email that stirs my inner rage. First, I HATE all caps emails, the print equivalent of nails on a blackboard. Second, and worse, this friend is the sort of critical palate who might knock down her Del Posto Yelp review because the Garganelli Al Ragu Bolognese was overcooked by a barely perceptible half-second. Yet here she was, screaming at me in an email message about the glories of a fast food joint from the South. The girl with an Omnivore's Dilemma pedigree was elated about slumming it. And she's not alone: there are untold thousands of otherwise perfectly sensible self-aware foodies who fall all over themselves for Chick-Fil-A, the culinary equivalent of being a Catholic schoolgirl by day, and a dirty little whore by night.

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This video of a Big Mac, fries, and soda, starts out like food porn — sumptuous photography, shallow depth of field, etc. — but like in the Matrix, the simulation starts to break down, revealing that the fast food is entirely digitally rendered.

It was easier to make the video using computers than shooting it live. Bruce Branit, of Branit|vfx, wrote: "We used photo modeling techniques from a real photograph of a Big Mac and the the fries. The fry box, Dr. Pepper, ice, bubbles, smoke, straw, environment, etc are all entirely CGI. The real reason to do this spot as CGI was to be able to choreograph the camera move in limited time and budget."

The video »

Fancy Fast Food (tagline: "Yeah it's still bad for you — but look how good it can look!") is a project that tears down fast food and rebuilds it, making it look like fancy restaurant food, complete with instructions. For example, they turn a Croissan’wich and Biscuit from Burger King into a BK Quiche and a Burrito Supreme from Taco Bell into a Tacobellini.

We'll leave it to the website to describe it better: "These photographs show extreme makeovers of actual fast food items purchased at popular fast food restaurants. No additional ingredients have been added except for an occasional simple garnish."

Also, there are more photos in the related galleries on Flickr.

[via @kasekaiserina]

The BeltzBib: Fill Your Fat Face While Driving, No Stains!

At first glance, The BeltzBib seems to solve one of life's major dilemmas: How do we keep our clothes clean while stuffing our faces with drive-thru while we're in the car? It goes so much further than the obvious solution of a mere bib — this being America, land of invention, land of fast food, and land of the automobile, a simple shirt covering won't do.

The BeltzBib, brilliant product that it is, has a built-in pouch to hold the food, and attaches to the seatbelt (safety first!) with Velcro to ensure the bib doesn't slip. Priced at a highly reasonable $13.95 (with free shipping no less), we can't decide if this yet another sign of the end-of-times or an important step in the evolution of snacking.

But maybe it's best left to their own description:

Keep reading »

Photograph: Eat Me Daily

A couple of weeks ago, we covered the release of McDonald's Mac Snack Wrap in all of the chain's 1,400 outlets in Canada — the Mac Snack Wrap, you may remember, is composed of the standard ingredients from a Big Mac, but stuffed inside a warm flour tortilla. But what we wanted was some decent pictures of the damned thing — and sometimes, the universe works in wonderful ways.

Photograph: Eat Me Daily

A tipster in Calgary sent in these spectacular photographs, an autopsy of sorts. Here's what he wrote in:

We've had The Mac Snack Wrap in Canada for a while now, and nobody really seems to care. I can't say I hate it -- if you like Big Macs, you'll like this, since it tastes basically identical. Less meat (about half a patty) to more sauce same as on a full two-patty burger, which is a ratio I like. They use the same shredded cheese used in the other snack wraps, so you don't get the melty processed cheese experience, and it seems like half the time they forget to put on the onions.

Pricewise it's a sucker's deal, since the Mac Snack Wrap is $1.89 [that's Canadian dollars –Ed.] and you get 4x the meat for twice the price with the full Big Mac, which is $3.79. But I guess you're paying for convenince, since I've never bitten into a Big Mac that hasn't fallen apart all over me, and the wrap holds together pretty well.

The McDonald's Mac Snack Wrap, disrobed »

This week McDonald's launched the Mac Snack Wrap in all of the chain's 1,400 outlets in Canada. It's just like the standard Big Mac, but instead all of the ingredients are stuffed inside a warm flour tortilla. It's a test run, and will be available through May 18th. Lucky Canadians! (No, this isn't a user-created item like the McGangBang, this is actually on the menu.)

So what's the deal? Are hamburgers just not portable enough? Is it a super-late-in-the-game attempt to cater to Atkins adherents? An attempt to drive Latinos into the stores? Or is this McDonald's trying to ride the "hip" and "healthy" illusion of wraps? We guess they'd be less messy to eat in a car, what with the wrap serving as a protective barrier for the gooey innards. We just sort of... don't get it.

Update 03/10/09:: A tipster sent in photographs of the Big Mac Snack Wrap.

But it's available in some test markets in the US »

January 30, 2009: Photograph from gree(blue)n, also on Flickr.

The McGangBang ranks up there in the holy pantheon of WTF. It's a sandwich made from a double cheeseburger and a McChicken sandwich — where you put an entire McChicken sandwich inside a double cheeseburger. It's a creative manipulation of existing menu items, and an exercise in frugality: taking two items off of the Dollar Menu and creating an entirely new sandwich for a total of $2.16. Truly, it's a sandwich that's more than the sum of its parts.

The naming, of course, is somewhat obscene — "gangbang" is defined as "sexual intercourse with multiple partners in turn or at the same time." It's illicit in more ways than one — chicken and beef most definitely make for an unnatural pairing.

In addition, it's sort of a subversive act for people to order it by name, as well as a thrill to confound the McDonald's employee with an order for a McGangBang — so much so that people are documenting their experiences at drive-thrus and counters on YouTube (see the many, many videos after the jump).

November 22, 2008: Photograph by bdaddyja

In some locations, the McGangBang appears to have become part of the McDonald's employee lexicon — explanation is unnecessary — they know how to make it, much like the off-the-menu items at In-N-Out.

An oft-repeated quote from user DasKosmischeVonUT on the VWVortex forums sums it up:

It's kind of like having a threesome with two ugly chicks. While it's happening you're stoked, because hey threesome!!! But once you're finished it kinda sinks in about what you've done.

We just had to do some research — we searched high and low, with Google, messageboards, YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter. Its origins are elusive — even how it's made varies — but what we do know is that it dates back to at least 2006. Herein we collect every bit of information we could find:

Update: McDonald's got back to us and provided an official statement (after the jump).

The origins of the McGangBang, with photos, videos, and more »

Photograph by markus941

The thing that I found most intriguing about Stacy Perman's intensively researched and heavily footnoted book In-N-Out Burger: A Behind-the-Counter Look at the Fast-Food Chain That Breaks All the Rules (out in April, preorder on Amazon), is buried in the acknowledgments at the back of the book. Somewhere between expressions of gratitude to her editor at Los Angeles magazine and to the friends who kept her sane, she calls out her most direct research assistants, the In-N-Out employees "who cooked up and served my off-menu preference, Grilled Cheese Animal Style."

One of the alluring things about In-N-Out Burger, as a culinary cult as much as a restaurant, is the secret society of off-menu ordering. While the posted offerings don't stray far from "burger" and "fries," there's an established argot of off-menu specialties. Translated into normal language, Perman's "Grilled Cheese Animal Style" means "a hamburger with special sauce, hold the burger." In other words, the author of a book about one of the most beloved and lauded burger restaurants in quite possibly the entire world doesn't, herself, like burgers.

At best, this is a tangential fact to the scope of Perman's book. But in a way it explains a lot about what goes on between the covers of this volume. I'm not sure that words exist to describe how excited I was when my review copy of In-N-Out Burger arrived, but by the end of my 300-plus page slog, I was left feeling more hungry than anything else. This is a book that's missing the meat.

Keep reading »

Oh, these troubled economic times. Jack in the Box is rolling out a $2.99 Jumbo Deal featuring a Jumbo Jack hamburger, two tacos, and a small order of fries. The deal eschews the commonly-added soft drink and clocks in at an impressive 1260 calories (we checked).

Funny that the company in their press release said: "Between the holidays and the tough economy, consumers are tightening their belts."

Grocery Eats does not have nice things to say about the Popeye's Chicken Biscuit:

Why in the fuck is Popeye’s now selling chicken biscuits? The only reason I can think of is because they want to compete with McDonald’s shitty chicken biscuit. It’s fucking Popeye’s Chicken AND Biscuits. It’s not a goddamn secret that they sell fried chicken and delicious biscuits. Just because some fucking cocksucker assembled it for you doesn’t mean a goddamn thing. This is retarded as fuck. I know I’m not much better because I fucking paid them to do it but still this is a waste. Yeah it’s good but they are charging you a service that could be completed with a plastic knife.

I want a real chicken biscuit this half ass gimmick slider from popeye’s was good but it wasn’t the realness.

Language Log reports on a very odd trend in Chinese fast food:

If you were a foreigner walking down the street in a Chinese city and you passed the restaurant below, you would do a double-take, because the familiar KFC has morphed into KFG, and Colonel Sanders doesn't look quite right. But if you were a Chinese walking down the street and passed by the same restaurant, you would do a triple-take, because the familiar 肯德基 (KEN3 ["consent; agree; be willing"]DE2 ["virtue"]JI1["foundation; base"]), which is simply a phonetic transcription of "Kentucky," has become 啃他雞 (KEN3 ["nibble; gnaw"] TA1 ["he, him, his"] JI1 ["chicken"]), with a blatant double entendre on the last syllable (referring to the male of the species).

Time for breakfast! Eggs, bacon, sausage, diced ham, cheddar cheese, hash browns, and a generous ladle of sausage gravy, all wrapped in a warm flour tortilla. 770 calories! Only $2.69! Bacon! [via]

Digital short by Jason Tremblay where a quarter pound with cheese hunts his prey, herds of chicken nuggets. The video »