Friday, June 20, 2008

Would You Like Fries With That?

A Burger King in London offers a gourmet $200 burger, with proceeds going to a children's charity.

Check this out. The burger's ingredients include the following: Japanese wagyu beef, white truffles, onions fried in Cristal champagne, topped with pink Himalayan rock salt.

They even sold a few, with one Burger King employee saying how a couple split the bill.

Now of course, if you're dropping the better part of $200 on a burger, you don't really want to be washing it down with any old soft drink, which is why if you're eating in you get a complimentary glass of wine.

Let me be clear. If I pay $200 for this, it had better not be made and served by some pimply-faced teenager!

Nothing wrong with donating a little money to charity, is there? Sure there is, because for some people, any amount of happiness is too much.

What's not going down so easily is Burger King's controversial concept of "delicious decadence" during a time of global economic meltdown and worldwide food shortages. Food crisis campaigners view it as the wrong burger at the wrong place at the wrong time.

"To come out with this kind of hugely expensive and over-the-top burger and to have 800 million people going to bed hungry every night is just to shoot yourself in the foot," said Dave Tucker of the organization "War On Want."


It's not a mercantilistic world, idiot. If Burger King got rid of this burger tomorrow, those 800 million people wouldn't instantly be fed. "Social justice" will not be served by eliminating this burger.

Some people will seize upon any reason to wag their fingers and moralize against the rest of us. I wonder what bumper stickers Mr. Tucker has on his car.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is that any different than paying $1,000 a plate to take part in a political fundraiser? I'm really hungry right now, so the burger sounds pretty good. However, I am also on a retired teacher's budget, so it's pretty much out of the question.

Darren said...

Of course it's different. At the political fundraiser, it's extremely likely your food is prepared by a professional and served by a trained waitstaff. Not that I have a problem with Burger King at all, but I work with teenagers every day--I don't want them working anywhere near my $200 burger!

Anonymous said...

If it helps that "800 million" is about 12% of the human population of the earth. The reason that's important is that it's the lowest number of hungry people in human history, down from about 72% in 1954 and continuing to trend downward.

Of course, a factoid like that wouldn't serve the purpose of the reporter displaying their moral outrage at the existence of the $200 hamburger which is the what's really important about the story.