Does It Come With a Side of Hemlock?

One could legitimately argue that fast food companies have been racing for the bottom ever since Ray bought the burger stand from the McDonald brothers and set up for mass production; however, it’s also true that no one has ever been compelled to purchase fast food, and healthier options are almost always available. Thus, I’m not going to do a lot of posts about how junk food meals (“made with real junk!”) are an insult to your intelligence as well as your health. When I saw the new Friendly’s sandwich being offered, however, I thought it deserved at least a mention in passing for its truly creative use of things that are not good for you in a single entre…


You can pick up the Consumerist story about it if you’d like, or go visit the company’s website for yourself here if you prefer. Basically, the new product is less hype than it is a hamburger patty with grilled cheese sandwiches for buns. You read that correctly, folks; a large flattened spheroid of ground beef stuck between four slices of buttered toast with cheese between each of the bread layers. It’s 1500 calories, 79 grams of fat (38 grams of it saturated), and 101 grams of carbohydrate, although to be fair I suppose we should also note that it provides 54 grams of protein (the equivalent of two cans of tuna). It’s kind of a lot for a single meal, but what makes it truly remarkable is that’s not even the worst thing on the company’s menu…


A quick search of the menu items turns up four other sandwiches with even higher calorie contents, as well as seven “basket” entre items and a few other things that go well above these figures. Any of these choices far exceed the much-maligned Hardee’s “Thickburgers,” the largest of which only weighs in at the 1320 calories. To those asking “why” anybody would field such a product (and risk another round of Doonesbury strips making fun of them), it seems clear that this is an attempt to compete with the much smaller (and far less destructive) “Double-Down” product from KFC, which uses pieces of chicken as the bread in a sandwich. A much better question would be why anyone would actually eat such a thing…


Now, I realize that there are people for whom 1500 calories really is just a light snack; there are also a fair number of people in our society who will routinely eat two smaller entre cheeseburgers for lunch, which is all this product really is. It wouldn’t rise to the level of mind-blowing, coronary-inducing excess unless you started with, say, the Loaded Jumbo Waffle Fries (1650 calories) and washed it down with a Butterfinger shake (990 calories), at which point you really do have one of the 4,000+ calorie meals parodied in the comics pages. And even then, there would still be people who could eat this will no ill effects – as could most people, in fact, if they were careful not to indulge too often. That’s not really what makes this a race to the bottom…


My point in calling all of this to your attention is that it clearly is an attempt to compete with several of the other “mega-entre” offerings produced by competitors in the same industry – which means that it’s really just an escalation in an ongoing war to see who can make the most unhealthful thing a person could ever eat. If this trend continues – and it’s hard to imagine why it wouldn’t, given how lucrative these products are – then eventually we can expect to see a single food item introduced to the public that is more hazardous to your health than smoking a carton of Lucky Strikes while chugging a case of rum, and can be ordered by yelling into a clown’s head and then driving around to the window…


Of course, you don’t have to purchase that ultimate product, anymore than you have to go to Hardee’s or Friendly’s right now. But I think we can say with some confidence that the fast food industry isn’t about to stop Racing to the Bottom any time soon…