Whooper Virgins

[Guest guest]

Published on Tuesday, December 9, 2008 by The Boston Globe

Burger King's Greasy Campaign

by Derrick Z. Jackson

 

When European germs wiped out Indians, at least that aspect of

conquest was unintentional. Burger King has no such excuse.

 

The modern colonizers currently have an ad campaign called " Whopper

Virgins. " Commercials are running during televised sports events, and

the company has a nearly eight-minute video on its website. In a

bizarre parody of an actual documentary, Burger King sent a crew out

to remote Hmong parts of Thailand, Inuit parts of Greenland, and a

village in Romania where people have both never seen a hamburger nor

ever heard of one through advertising. The narration starts, " The

hamburger is a culinary culture and it's actually an American

phenomenon [as if we didn't know this]. "

 

The first part of the video involved plucking some villagers to come

to a modern office in local and native dress to compare Burger King's

signature burger with a McDonald's Big Mac. Villagers are shown

fumbling with the burger, with a patronizing narrator saying, " It's

been very interesting to see their reaction to the hamburger because

they've never seen such a foreign piece of food before and they didn't

even quite know how to pick it up and they didn't know how to - from

what end to eat. . . .It was really interesting. We were able to see

these people's first bite of a hamburger. "

 

Remarking on the villagers' awkwardness in handling the burger, the

narrator added: " It took them awhile to understand the dynamics of it

and so that was fascinating to see because we take it for granted

'cause we live in America where hamburgers are consumed like a

staple. "

 

After the guinea pig villagers decided (of course!) that the Whopper

tasted better than the Big Mac, Burger King sent a production crew out

to the villages to cook burgers. Under the guise of " sharing things

about both our cultures (Gee, where have we heard that before in

sanitized colonial history?), shots of a burger broiler being

airlifted and sledded in by dog are shown. The villagers, of course,

like the burger, with the narrator saying, " They told us yesterday,

'No, we want to experience other things in this world, too. We want to

taste other foods. We want to see other people. We want to see other

things.' "

 

Right out of the most banal of Thanksgiving scripts, the narrator

says, as one of the crew receives a coat, " And they've been

extraordinarily gracious to us. " Burger King defends the ads, saying

it worked hard to respect cultural sensitivities.

 

All this, to spread disease to developing peoples. And Burger King

knows it. The Westernization of the global diet, led by America's fast-

food giants, is helping spread obesity and diabetes as it has never

been seen before. It's not enough that those diseases are off the

charts with Native Americans here at home. Now we want to seduce

Inuits abroad. Even if levels of obesity stay what they are now, the

number of people around the world with diabetes will explode from the

171 million people of 2000 to 366 million by 2030.

 

The numbers will more than triple in places ranging from the

Democratic Republic of the Congo to Bangladesh to Guatemala. They will

more than double or nearly triple in China, India, Brazil, and Mexico.

According to WHO researchers, diabetes was already responsible in 2000

for nearly 3 million deaths around the world. " Given the increasing

prevalence of obesity, it is likely that these figures provide an

underestimate of future diabetes prevalence, " those researchers said.

Translated, even more people will die.

 

The WHO, not surprisingly, says, " Initiatives by the food industry to

reduce the fat, sugar, and salt content of processed foods . . . could

accelerate health gains worldwide. "

 

But no, Burger King wants to colonize the farthest reaches with fat,

sugar, and salt.

 

The irony was when the locals made the crew their native food in the

video. The meal ladled out for them was smothered in vegetables. The

crew yum-yummed " Nice, " " Wonderful, " " So good, " and

even, " Insane. "

That was the height of patronization given their mission. Burger

King's violation of the " Whopper Virgins " is an insane reenactment

of

the worst of American colonial history.

 

© 2008 The Boston Globe