Burger King is Despicable: A Rant

I'm hesitant to write this post at all because it just brings more attention to Burger King's detestable "Whopper Virgins" ad campaign, but I am so deeply disturbed by it all that I have to vent.

I first saw a teaser ad for this campaign during SNL last night. The ad asks: "What happens if you take Transylvanian Farmers who have never eaten a burger and ask them to compare Whopper versus Big Mac?"


Photo by spinnerin

This immediately struck me as a strange sort of cultural imperialism. My father was born and raised in Transylvania, and I have visited the Transylvanian countryside twice myself. The people in these rural villages have endured horrible oppression by totalitarian dictatorships and still drive horse-drawn carts to transport their goods, but Burger King only cares to exploit their "virgin" palates so they can outsell McDonalds.

I headed to the Whopper Virgins website to do my research before writing this angry diatribe. Once there, I was greeted by an extended ad for Burger King shot in "documentary style," complete with behind-the-scenes interviews on the making of the commercial. The ad followed the crew as they found people in three "remote locations" who had never tried a burger before in their lives. The three locations turned out to be Romania, Thailand, and Greenland.

They do the taste test, and - SURPRISE! - most of the tasters prefer the Whopper. That's predictable. The thing that really made me cringe was listening to the "filmmakers" marvel at how the villagers didn't know how to eat a burger, while violin-and-synth inspirational music swells in the background. Are we supposed to be sentimental about this?

"Here, have some cholesterol-laden, artery-clogging, processed food to replace your organic, hearty, home-grown diet! Oh, how cute! You don't know how to eat it! Well, you'll learn."

It's like the culinary equivalent of distributing smallpox-infected blankets.

The whole thing was amazingly condescending.

But wait, there's more! It turns out the "Transylvanian villagers" mentioned in the ad aren't from Transylvania at all. They're from Budesti, a town 30 kilometers southeast of Bucharest. That's on the opposite end of Romania from Transylvania. On top of that, the villagers they interviewed appeared to be Roma (a.k.a. Gypsies), an ethnic group that has been consistently marginalized and persecuted throughout history. But don't fret! Now they have American fast food to make them happy!

And while we're talking persecution, let's jump to the Thailand location for the Whopper Virgins shoot. The credits for the ad thank the "Hmong of Baan Mon Kghor and Baan Khun Chang Kian, Thailand." I was born in Fresno, California, where there is a large population of Hmong immigrants and I grew up with many Hmong friends. Hmong people live in Fresno for the same reason they now live in Thailand: they are political refugees from Laos.


Photo by Phil-osophical Bird

But wait, there's more! They're not just your average, everyday refugees from an oppressive communist dictatorship (like my dad was), they've been forced out of Laos thanks to lots of United States meddling. See, in the 1960s, the CIA started recruiting Hmong people to fight a secret war against the Laotian government. When that didn't work out in our favor, the Laotian government began systematically targeting the Hmong. That spurred thousands to flee to Thailand, where many still live in refugee camps.

But all Burger King cares about is whether the Hmong prefer their burger over the other guy's.

"Sorry our government is responsible for the complete displacement of your people. We know all the death and destruction must have been a drag. As a consolation prize, have a burger! (Preferably a Whopper.)"

And Burger King has the gall to pretend they're doing these people a favor. This is a direct quote from the ad:

"They told us yesterday, 'no, we want to experience other things in this world, too. We want to taste other foods, we want to see other people, we want to see other things."

Apparently, eating a Whopper is the best we can offer.

Then they show a Romanian villager giving a guy from the American crew an elaborate, handmade fur jacket. The American guy is amazed at this and says, "these things take a month to make and this guy just handed it to me!" So give it back. It may be seen as rude, but those villagers need that jacket more than you do. He's not going to wear it in Los Angeles, while shopping at the Grove or taking a stroll down the Santa Monica pier. At best, he'll show it off to his other commercial-director friends as a quaint souvenir of his morally-bereft visit to Romania.

The final ethnic group Burger King decided to exploit were the Inuit of Greenland. I don't know a lot about their culture, so I'm not going to pretend. But this guy really made me happy:



"I like seal meat better."

Amen, brother. A-men!

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P.S. Discussion point: what's worse? This Burger King campaign, or what Borat did to that other Romanian village. Debate and discuss.