Morning Sickness

Bet THAT got your attention:

Burger King has just announced their newest burger, the BK Quad Stacker. Four hamburgers, four slices of cheese, eight strips of bacon and almost a day’s worth of calories in just one sandwich. In a rare show of corporate honesty, Burger King announced the burger with the following statement:

“We’re satisfying the serious meat lovers by leaving off the produce and letting them decide exactly how much meat and cheese they can handle.”


Now, The Guardian:

You do not forget your first encounter with a Burger King Stacker Quad. Mine happened in a particularly dispiriting branch of the fast-food chain, on Eighth Avenue in New York - a windowless underground outlet, accessible via a flight of stairs, or alternatively by a stairlift capable of supporting someone weighing up to 450lb. The Stacker Quad, as you discover when you summon the nerve to order it, consists of four beef patties, four slices of cheese, and four strips of bacon in a bun, all glistening in far more grease than a regular Whopper or Big Mac. There is no trace of lettuce or tomato or onion, a fact specifically singled out for celebration in the TV ads that accompanied the launch of the Stacker product range in the United States a few weeks ago.

"We're satisfying the serious meat lovers by leaving off the produce and letting them decide exactly how much meat and cheese they can handle," said Denny Marie Post, Burger King's chief concept officer, and a figure of some notoriety on the frontiers of fast-food science. I certainly discovered my own limits. Eating a BK Stacker Quad is the gastronomic equivalent of being punched in the gut by a mugger, except that instead of having all my money stolen, I was relieved of only $6.99, medium fries and soda included.

The Stacker may be extraordinary, but it is far from unique. Recent times have seen the launch - mainly in America for now, but give it time - of a rash of products that the industry calls "indulgent offerings": foods marketed specifically on the basis of how much meat and cheese and how few annoying vegetables they contain. Earlier in the day at Burger King, it could have been the Meat'Normous Omelet Sandwich; over at Denny's, the Extreme Grand Slam Breakfast; at Hardee's, another US chain, the Monster Thickburger (two thirds-of-a-pound slices of Angus beef, eight bacon strips and three cheese slices in a buttered bun). Hardee's calls the Thickburger "a monument to decadence", although they might equally have pointed out that it is a handy way for the average adult male to consume 70% of his recommended daily calorific intake in a single meal.

It is worth recalling how strange these developments would have seemed just two years ago, when the fast-food backlash was at its height. Burger chains across the world, responding to alarming market research, began offering salads and fruit and fresh juices. McDonald's launched the GoActive meal, which consisted of a salad, bottled water and a pedometer; it also began phasing out its supersized meals, though it insisted the policy had nothing to do with the surprise success of Morgan Spurlock's documentary Super Size Me, the stomach-churning film that came to symbolise the uprising. The American burger restaurant Wendy's added a fresh-fruit bowl to its menu; at the end of last year, the company quietly killed it, blaming a lack of demand. "We listened to consumers who said they wanted to eat fresh fruit," a disarmingly honest spokesman told the New York Times, "but apparently they lied."

The industry's mistake, it seems, had been to listen to the market researchers instead of the food psychologists. People tell researchers what they think they want to hear, or what the respondents want to believe about themselves. But the little-trumpeted field of food psychology may be one of the closest things that the corporate world has to a window on its customers' souls. We know, thanks to recent findings, that people drink more than a third more fruit juice when they pour it into a short, wide glass instead of a narrow, tall one, and that people will eat more of a product if it comes in a bigger package. We know that people will report that a breakfast bar tastes worse if the packaging describes it as containing soy, even if it contains no soy, and that Black Forest Double-Chocolate Cake tastes better than Chocolate Cake, even when the cakes themselves are identical. Above all, we know that just because people say they want to eat more healthily, it doesn't mean they really do.

"Expectations exert a tremendous influence," says Brian Wansink, a food psychologist whose book, Mindless Eating, will be published in the US later this year. "If the expectation is that a product is some kind of sacrifice, that it's not an indulgence - if you go in thinking that, then, lo and behold, that's what it'll be like." Denny Marie Post, at Burger King, concedes that the fast-food industry vastly overestimated the appeal of healthier product lines. "Healthy eating is more a state of intention than it is of action," she says now. (I had left a message on her voicemail, which urges callers to go and eat at Burger King while they are waiting for her to call back.) "There is a very small percentage who line up their behaviour with their intentions. And then there's a large percentage, and I am one, who wake up every morning saying, 'I'm going to be better today,' and when it comes down to it and you're hungry and ready to eat ... then things are different."

It is at this point, if you're hungry enough, that you cave in and order a BK Stacker Quad, which contains as much saturated fat as three Big Macs or five portions of large fries. This is as much as you should consume in a day and a half, according to US government recommendations - although it would have been hard to calculate this in the Eighth Avenue restaurant, where the wallchart of nutritional information mysteriously omitted the Stacker range. (It remains unclear whether this product, or similar ones, will be launched in the UK any time soon, though in general terms, British medical researchers estimate, the country is only about seven years behind the US when it comes to the epidemic of obesity.)

The anti-fast-food backlash largely sparked its own backlash, Wansink believes. "The typical person going to a fast-food restaurant isn't driving in there with a BMW and an expense account," he says. "They've got a couple of bucks in their pocket, and their big objective is to get full. The critics of fast food don't fall into that market." During his research, fast-food customers told him they resented being told what to eat by self-righteous critics, and the chains pummel this message home in their advertising. The Monster Thickburger "isn't necessarily politically correct", Hardee's proudly boasts. Burger King advertises the Stacker with the manly slogan: "Stack it high, tough guy." Post says, "The whole concept is you size it your way," noting that BK Stacker Doubles sell better than Stacker Triples, which in turn sell more than Stacker Quads. "It's all about choice. You know, we have apple sauce as an option on our kids' meals. In fact, it's prominently featured. But I'd say less than one in 15 or 20 make that choice."

It is tempting, in light of these developments, to regard the salads-and-fruit product ranges launched a few years ago as an anomaly - a period of a few years that future social historians will come to see as a moment when we foolishly believed our strength of will might prevail over our animal attraction to meat and frying fat. Besides, as critics of the industry point out, many of the "healthy" products are not particularly good for you: with dressing, Wendy's chicken salad contains more calories than most of the burgers they sell. And in any case, if you're self-disciplined enough to eat well, why on earth would you try to do it at Burger King or McDonald's?

But that would be to ignore the phenomenon that haunts fast-food executives such as Post, whose job it is to know what you want before you know you want it: the so-called "veto vote". This is the point at which the psychology of restaurant-going begins to seem like decision-making at the UN security council: in any normal group of people trying to decide where to eat, any individual member holds the power to derail a plan to eat at any given restaurant if the menu doesn't meet their requirements. Burger King can't afford to ignore health-conscious vegetarians, for example, because it only takes one of them - in a family group that might also contain five hungry omnivores - to deprive the chain of six potential customers. "We call it the 'mother segment'," Wansink says. "The kids drive the initial desire to go to the restaurant, and then you have the apple and walnut salad, that mom can eat, so she doesn't have a good reason not to eat there." (It's significant that McDonald's, alone among the burger chains, seems to have opted out of the current trend for extravagantly unhealthy new product lines: increasingly, it presents itself as a family restaurant, and may have decided that too much association with "indulgent offerings" would damage its brand.)

If you feel complacently immune to all this -perhaps you never set foot in fast-food restaurants, or, if you do, you always buy the same modest hamburger - it might be worth taking a look at the work of Andrew Geier, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania whose academic activities recently included placing a large bowl of M&Ms in the lobby of an apartment building. "Eat your fill," read a sign he placed next to the bowl. "Please use the spoon to serve yourself." He left it there for 10 days in a row, alternating between using a teaspoon, and a spoon that held a quarter of a cup of sweets. When they were using the bigger spoon, people on average took two-thirds more M&Ms. This phenomenon is known as "unit bias" - the way we tend to think that whatever sized unit a product is provided in must be the appropriate amount to consume. Yoghurt pots in France are about half as big as yoghurt pots in the US, Geier and his colleagues found, but the French do not buy twice as many pots of yoghurt. "That's just the size they expect a yoghurt to be," Geier says. The creeping expansion of portion sizes influences us all, unknowingly, inside fast-food restaurants and outside.

Of course, you could argue that there is a refreshing honesty in products such as the BK Stacker Quad - it's a fatty pile of meat, and doesn't pretend otherwise - and there's some evidence that this approach is gaining a foothold elsewhere in the consumer economy. The best example is probably a US television ad for Hummer, the manufacturer of preposterous, lumbering, military-style SUVs, which non-owners like to explain as compensating for their owners' feelings of inferior manhood. (You can watch the ad online at tinyurl.com/mea23.) In the first scene, a man is at the supermarket checkout, buying tofu, carrots and soy. A second man arrives in the queue behind him, with a trolley full of meat and barbecue supplies.

The first man, looking queasy and insecure, completes his purchase, then immediately drives to a Hummer dealership, where he buys a massive new vehicle. "Restore the balance", the on-screen slogan reads. The man drives off, secure at last in his masculinity. Victoriously, he chomps on one of his carrots, but it seems hard to imagine that a carrot is going to be enough, now that he owns a Hummer. What he needs next, surely, is a BK Stacker Quad.