Arteriopsychosis

This commercial makes me ill.



No, what makes me ill is not the opening twelve seconds, featuring middle-aged men's heads pasted onto young women's bodies, shrieking at an unseen celebrity. That's pretty awful, don't get me wrong, but it's where things go from there.

Announcer: "Obsessing over celebrity, that's wrong. Unless that celebrity is bacon."

First of all, bacon is not a person, therefore it's not a "celebrity." Second of all, while there are many people with unhealthy obsessions with celebrities, few of them are so literally unhealthly as an obsession with bacon would be. But do continue.

Announcer: "Introducing the Baconator from Wendy's! Six strips of bacon-"

All right, just stop right there. Six strips of bacon. Six motherfucking strips of greasy fried pork, dumped on top of what is already a two-patty hamburger with cheese. I can't believe there's a place that has the nerve to sell this. Ready for some nutrition facts?

Baconator: 276 g weight; 830 calories; 51 g fat; 170 mg cholesterol; 1920 mg sodium.

Sweet Jesus. Well, who can compete with that? The worst burger on McDonalds' standard menu, the double Quarter Pounder with cheese, has nearly 100 fewer calories, 9 fewer grams of fat, less cholesterol, and more than 500 fewer mg of sodium. Burger King has Wendy's beat if you get a Triple Whopper, but the Triple Whopper also weighs almost 200 grams more than the Baconator. In other words, there's really no other way to get something so horrible in such a small package.

Obsess over bacon? That's really how they're going to promote this? Obsess. Obsess over a horrible, fat-laden, salted meat product that will fucking kill you if you eat it like a pig. Why is this okay? They can't run cigarette ads on TV, and even alcohol ads have to pay lip service to personal responsibility by encouraging the viewer to "drink responsibly." So how do fast food chains keep getting away with stuff like this? Haven't we reached a point yet where people should be forcing Wendy's to stick a graphic on the screen saying how many calories their Fibrillator - sorry, Baconator - contains?

I'm all for personal responsibility, but a commercial like this is the food equivalent of a commercial showing a guy chugging four cans of beer and then going, "Ahh, Budweiser!" You'd never see that on television, so what's Wendys' excuse? I'm getting a tiny tongue-in-cheek vibe, but it's not nearly evident enough. And anyway, they're selling this monstrosity, so it's not like they don't want you to consume hideous amounts of bacon. They want you to cram bacon and beef and cheese into your face, and they would love it if you did so on a daily basis, or even more frequently. They know how bad this shit is for you, but they don't care. They've posted the nutrition facts, so they've done their job - never mind that merely offering such a product is completely disgusting. The "this is why Americans are fat" tag has never been so aptly deployed.