“Burger King brings its infamous black burger from Japan to the UK just in time for Halloween!” The Daily Mail headline read. “Bloody hell,” I thought. “What’s all this?” Turns out Burger King are now selling a limited-edition Whopper Burger that in a bizarre twist sandwiches its fillings between two coal-black buns. The article’s images invited me to gaze upon what was undoubtedly one of the least appetizing things I’d ever seen. I had to try it.
Who knows why? Latent self loathing most likely. And so once again I found myself in a familiar position, contemplating putting something truly, deeply repellent into my mouth. So off I sauntered to locate the prime Cornmarket real estate currently being devalued by the sticky-floors of a Burger King.
What a fucking let down this burger was. I should have known from the defeated stare of the woman who served me as I placed my order. “Do you want to go large on the meal?” her mouth had asked; “wage labour is a process of alienation from ourselves,” her eyes silently screamed. But the queue had been so long and a guy on a different till had already yelled at me, that I was just thrilled to be handed a warm meal.
So, tray replete with 7 Up (lemony), fries (disappointingly unsalty), and mysterious hamburger, I made my past the disconcertingly large wall-mounted panorama of the rad cam (because it’s burger shaped!?) and over to a surprisingly debris-free table. I seized my burger from its wrappings. It looked kind of … deflated? Photographs of fast food consistently rank amongst the most deceitful images in the world, so I can’t say I was particularly surprised. At a glance it looked a bit like a black sock sitting atop a multicoloured shirt in someone’s dirty laundry. Anyway, in the interests of journalism I soldiered on, taking a tentative bite that still managed to include most of the ingredients. It wasn’t bad I guess. The bun was bbq flavoured, but in the way that a blue Slush Puppy supposedly tastes like raspberry. Anyway, long story short it tastes a lot like a normal fast food burger but with some bbq sauce added. Fine as long as you know what you’re in for I suppose.
Also, black is supposedly slimming but I checked online and there are at least 50 more calories in this than you’d find in a standard Whopper.
Still, I finished the burger. Thankfully, my bodily functions seemingly remained in stasis, which I attribute to the powers of positive thinking and a history of eating truly foul foods in large quantities. To be honest, I’d have appreciated the confirmation that it had in fact exited my digestive tract.
Yet the real disappointment was not the burger itself, but that for a few fleeting moments, I’d allowed some twat in a marketing department to succeed in getting me excited to inhale a mass-produced burger just because they lobbed in an extra handful of e-numbers.
Perhaps the true horror of this burger and its unnatural perversion is the depths to which we’ll sink for ‘new’ experiences inside the materialist prison of late capitalism. Happy Halloween!
