rolling new food laboratory inventions for american chain restaurants thread

This website, "Hack the Menu," is both incredibly depressing and extraordinarily liberating

http://i.imgur.com/EgHBkV9.png

My initial reaction was "man fuck people for feeling like they can make fast food workers do a song and dance in the name of blogging to an ILX thread about it" but then I thought maybe making something called a McGangBang is a nice break in the drudgery of the job but then I went back to feeling like "fuck these guys"

It is a very, very good thing that McD doesn't do root beer in the UK any more otherwise I'd be dead from Float-A-Day Disease, and disgusted with myself for going to McD's.

Don't EVER deny yourself the pleasure of McDonalds. I've eaten at restaurants, actual restaurants with plates, knives and forks, places that offer you a starter or a pudding, and I've rarely eaten ANYTHING as nice as a McDonalds Double Cheeseburger.

I used to love McDonalds, it was like my biggest treat as a kid. Then somewhere around the time I started working in a shopping mall in my teens, it ceased being a treat and just became occasional, predictable lunch. And then in my 20s it became the thing I ate while on the run for work, at airports and train stations and on the late night trek back to a hotel. And now I'm in my late 30s, I mostly avoid it, because I want to reach my late 40s. But Friday night we grabbed a McDonalds because my partner's five months pregnant and was starving and there was nowhere else nearby. And it was dry, flavourless and disappointing. and then i felt like crap the rest of the night.

When my mother was a teenager in the late 50s, one of the first McD's opened across from her high school (the same one I'd later go to). The school could not have a closed-campus policy because the staff would've spent all their time handing out detentions to students otherwise. This is how it looked:

https://scontent-a-lhr.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/t1/1536688_10202673360903250_172409856_n.jpg

If you order the Chicken McNuggets at McDonalds you are usually asked if you would like BBQ sauce with them. But, they seldom offer you the wide range of sauces that they have available, unless of course you know the McDonalds secret menu and can ask for your favorite variety of McDonalds Dipping Sauces

The fuck? WhereI am theres a range of those things and theyre part of the menu/ads etc.

That website is weird and trainspotty and all that food looks fucking disgusting.

Dang suzy your mom was on the cutting edge, the sliced salami, the new wave, the bratwurst board, the poppin pickle, the grand inauguration of the food laboratory experiment era

So was everyone who was a suburban teenager in the 1950s. I kid her that her job as a waitress in a 'sidewalk cafe' in America's first enclosed shopping mall meant she was present at the birth of postmodernism. My dad worked at a food processing plant in the mid-'70s and once my parents could see what was going into mass-produced fast food eg. soft-serve ice cream, there were no more trips to Dairy Queen or McDonalds for us.

what's in the soft serve?

http://i.imgur.com/nhDBMzO.jpg

That's mechanically recovered meat! GROSS.

Land, Sea and Air hack very disappointing:

How to Order
Order a Big Mac (or McDouble), a Filet-O-Fish, and a McChicken. Now assemble this behemoth of a burger how ever you see fit!

Why am I doing all the work here?

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/02/americas-shame-our-ketchup-packets/283576/

some yglesias steez here

http://i.imgur.com/qRn7ivr.jpg

Think I was issued these at a Chick Fila once. They are completely awesome

Have used the Australian style ones but with jam instead. Those are completely awesome too

"pinpoint accuracy"!

hahaha i love when people decide for some reason that there have to be callouts of several features, and they don't really have them, so you get totally pointless filler text like that. Reminds me of action figures where the fact that the guy's legs can move becomes Swift pivot action! or w/e.

they have those ketchup packs at wendy's also and they are completely awesome

Our sauce packets are great! They result in things like this happening:

https://fbcdn-sphotos-f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-frc3/t1/s720x720/486193_10151098680072757_1603340313_n.jpg

^^ I don't know if I can deal with that.

Haha :)

The best bit was I did it by accident.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/02/come-tour-the-mcnugget-factory/283633/

rolling new food laboratory propaganda innovations

ooh

That's what goes into each of the four McNugget shapes: bell, ball, bow tie (also known as bone), and boot. That there are four canonical McNugget shapes is the most interesting fact we learn on the factory tour. It removes us one more step from the natural chicken image but brings us one closer to that of a controlled, ordered system. Bell, ball, bone, boot. No surprises.

Need a poll

lol

The Moms even watch the chickens as they're killed. "In the slaughter area," one writes, "everyone was so calm and peaceful I didn’t know where I was until it was pointed out to me."

How many of us, too, in some sense, are unaware that we are in a slaughterhouse?

the mcnugget factory video is just like the WONDERS OF INDUSTRY film footage of yore, all kinds of graceful mechanical efficiencies and a constant stream of abundance

http://www.retrocrush.com/scary/Wonka-Chicken-1.jpg

"In the slaughter area," one writes, "everyone was so calm and peaceful I didn’t know where I was until it was pointed out to me."

The removal of the dark meat McNugget was a black day for McDonalds

most otm

was like winning the lottery

You may have noticed that it says intestinal tissue and bone. The Mississippi doctors also found nerve tissue, a lot of fat, and "generous quantities of epithelium and associated supportive tissue."

I need to get this off my chest

There's nothing wrong with using the whole animal unless it leads to something like Mad Cow Disease

The only disease I can see from eating Chicken bones in McNuggest is... the Mad-for-Chicken-McNuggets disease ;)))

"Man can't believe there's bone in chicken nuggets..." *goes to Per Se and eats 50 different kinds of animal marrow for $40000*

yeah eating everything is best imo

otm

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KL3G7751z_k/UgKTxIwKWGI/AAAAAAAAD1M/UMZnjtTieok/s400/flatizza.jpg

do they actually say 'fla-teats-a'??

Is the quoted length the side or diagonal?

This is a 'must know'

flat-titz-a

Is the quoted length the side or diagonal?

Bone-pressed erect length probably/

http://i.imgur.com/11zlFkD.jpg

http://www.mintel.com/menu-insights

^^ Need a subscription to this

Mintel Minside (TM)

http://www.burgerbusiness.com/?p=16806

are burgers behind the buffalo sauce surge?

i think this is the kind of thing that ezra klein is going to be bringing us more of, trying to explain the context, really looking for answers

http://www.junkfoodguy.com/2014/02/10/7-11doritosloaded/

thanking you, maura

Tonite I asked the dude I always order from at my neighborhood subway "hey so how are those flatizzas selling?" and he just made the gasface and shook his head and when I pressed him for details he just said "you don't want that, man"

*Subway dude is drowned by unsold flatizzas*

My family would eat subway after church every week bc buy one get one foot longs. Once when we were the only people in there, the dude working brought out some weird pizza thing he made with ingredients and gave it to us for free. Said he was going to take it to corporate. This was in the 90s. Hope that dude made this happen.

that man's name... was Bruno Flatizza

I had one of the McDonalds "premium wraps" the other night because it was the only thing open by work. I got the grilled chicken one and it just had this vague STINK to it. Like it didn't smell old or gone bad, it just smelled very slightly gross.