Its hard not to find McDonalds or Burger King burgers tasty at some point in your life. Be it when dying with a hangover, or post drinking session with your friends or just because you are hungry, we’ve all done it. I went through a period of many years where I didn’t venture near fast food joints after reading Eric Schlosser’s excellent book, Fast Food Nation.
However now I’m older and far more ignorant. So when my head is pounding after a night on the tiles, I will settle, the odd time, for a drive thru from whatever fast food joint is nearby.
The trick with fast food is the flavour. Not the ingredients that are pulled from the ground, but the lab created flavours. Schlosser goes into as much detail as legally allowed in his book to explain it. Despite the complexity of it, one thing is for sure, you can blindfold a person and they will know the difference between a Big Mac and a Whopper. Both companies are very proud of their burgers that for sure.
But a strange thing happened recently. On a hungover trip to McDonalds, they had a new burger on the menu, the Big Tasty. ( I believe its called the Big N’ Tasty in some countries). It was a few quid extra but it looked huge and had bacon on it and I had a hangover..
It was tasty. Not as big as I expected but tasty. However there was something glaringly obvious about it as I removed the huge slices of tomatoes from the bun. It tastes exactly like Burger King’s Whopper.
Some google searches later and it transpires that the burger was introduced to directly compete with Burger King’s Whopper. See here. Now maybe I’m naive and this is common knowledge. But for the few extra euro for the same tasting, slightly smaller looking burger, I never thought I’d say this but….. I should have went to Burger King!
