Today I went to burger king for the first time in years. It was even worse than I remembered it. (had the vegetarian option, don’t know if it’s as bad with the meat burgers) Additionally it’s fucking expensive and not as quick as it used to be. So my question is why do some people go there regulary?
I can get two whoppers for about 5 dollars and they are full of flavor over here (Brazil).
Hi, that’s me. I get an hour for lunch during the week, and there are a handful of fast food places minutes from my work. I drive through, and sit in the parking lot eating my lunch and playing games on my phone. It’s my quiet time for the day.
There’s a bit of a game for some of these fast food places. Most people just roll up and order a #1 or whatever was in the commercials. That’s how they get ya!
Sometimes you need to download the app, or check the menu for a budget meal. A slightly smaller burger and less than a pound of fries is an adequate meal for around $5-7.
I used to order a kid’s meal, and it was more than enough food for an adult. My kids enjoyed getting toys at the end of the day, too, but they were all plastic garbage.
One of my coworkers lost a lot of weight, and when I asked him what he was doing to lose weight he said he was ordering kids meals.
Honest question: Why not cook a bunch of meals once or twice a week and eat that instead? It can be cheaper and it’s way less likely to get you sick in the long run.
Honest answer: Because that sounds terrible.
I’m not going to waste my time cooking food that I won’t eat at it’s prime, just so it can take up my fridge space until I inevitably ruin it with a microwave later in the week.
Also, storing and reheating good creates MUCH more potential for contamination and food borne illness.
I can pay for my lunch with the money I make in the first half hour of the day. It’s not breaking the bank.
That’s 4.5hrs of your turn at work every week. 18hrs a month.
I am like you, I do what works best for me and sometimes I value the expense. But let’s not minimize how much it actually is!
And meal prepping is 2 hours of your week every week, plus however long you have to work to pay for the ingredients, which is probably another 2 hours
You do not need to hover around a kitchen cooking for 2hrs to prep for the week. Hell throw a bunch of stuff in a crockpot and let it cook all day. That’s like a 20-30min commitment of actual work.
You are missing the point, it’s not “4.5 hours a week of work” vs “absolutely nothing”, it’s 4.5 hours of work vs however long to have to work to pay for the ingredients, plus the time to make the food. If I spend an hour meal prepping and it takes me an hour and a half to pay for the ingredients, eating out at lunch only costs me 2 additional hours of my time, not 4.5
I also don’t know what meal you are preparing where chopping veggies, searing meat, packaging and cleaning up afterwards only takes 20 minutes. Even making chili, which is the prototypical “throw everything in a pot” recipe takes me north of an hour when all is said and done
1.5hrs of work for 5 days of ingredients isn’t economical?
I understand that the math on this is not as simple as a lot of people make it out to be, but you’re not going to convince me that eating out for lunch every single day is even remotely comparable in cost to half-decent meal prepping.
This is what I do - make a big pot of chili or soup for the week. But I recognize that this might not work for everyone. At my work there’s a conveniently located fridge and microwave, and I can eat in my office with the door shut for a quiet meal. If any of those things weren’t there it might not be worth it.
I also enjoy cooking, and don’t mind spending time making my meal for the week. If the prep work was a real chore then it’d be much more tempting to buy something premade every day.
I tend to do it by cooking extra portions for dinner each night and taking in that portion/leftovers the next day, that way there is no meaningful extra work.
And if we have time to plan on a weekend i like to do a meal that i can cook a big batch on a sunday that will reheat well, ie: chili (as you said), lasagna, spaghetti bolognese, thai curry, stir fry with rice, etc.
Edit: also wanted to note that yes buying lunch occasionally is super tasty but i feel much worse afterwards that afternoon, and it has also pushed me to step up my cooking skills and think i am quite good for a home cook now.
Same, when I ate fast food a lot it was because there were places next to work. Eat in my car and read for the short amount of time I had.
Sometimes a Culver’s cold custard just hits different.
Especially hits your wallet that shit makes burger king look like it’s still the 70s.
in the 1970s, bk didn’t suck nearly as much as they do now. but yea, culver’s is the good stuff–although they have dipped a bit lately. i think they’re expanding too fast in their quest for more dollars.
Same. I’ve only had fast food once since 2020, and the experience was like yours: gross and expensive.
Before I went WFH, I ate FF pretty regularly. Mostly because it was, well, fast and offered a variety (there’s at least 8 or 9 places within walking distance of my office).
My job only gives a half hour for lunch. I used to pack a lunch, but that gets tedious after a while and takes extra time out of my morning to prepare. Then if I want to heat it up, there’s always a line to use the microwaves or to get to the refrigerator in the break room. By the time my packed lunch is prepared, I’ve got just enough time to wolf it down and head back to my desk.
Going out for FF at least let me take a walk, get some fresh air, and gave me a variety over the handful of things (or leftovers) I would pack from home.
If I ever have to RTO, that’s the aspect I’d be most upset about.
Is “FF” just slang for Fat Fuck?
Ford Focus
Foreign Farts
Nah. I just chow down on Firefox 3-4 times a week lol
Sometimes I channel my spirit animal
And I hunger for a pile of garbage.
We have not gone to a fast food in the last fifteen or twenty years, if not more. Why would we? It’s not welcoming, the food taste like… cardboard, it’s rarely a pleasant place to eat, and people are often noisy. When we want to eat a burger, we cook it ourselves with fresh food. Yep, when we want to have some, even the fries are handmade. There is just no comparison.
There’s always a local restaurant that can do an even better job.
Most certainly, but I would also not call that a fast food, not one that serves handmade burgers. Those are true restaurants.
We had one a few block block from us, it was real excellent. When they bring the plates to our table (we don’t have to queue, and the place was nice and quiet, and comfy) it’s almost like looking at a wonderful mix of poetry and painting that’s made out of bread, with those little sesame seeds, overflowing salad, the pickles, onions, juicy and thick meat (they have true vegan alternatives) and fries that don’t look like fat squishy toothpicks. Their burgers tasted good just by looking at them, and they’re even better when you would take a bite :)
But they’re also not that fast to prepare the burger, and a tad more expensive than the nearby McDo or whatever.
Preparing food at home isn’t “fast food,” either. It’s likely slower, assuming you don’t have a professional fry station in your kitchen.
Preparing food at home isn’t “fast food,” either.
It certainly is not, and that’s my whole point. You don’t need to go to a fast food to eat a burger. That said, it’s not that long and it can also be a lot of fun doing it with your spouse, like we do, our with friends. A lot more fun ;)
And if’s because of time constraints one goes fast food, one can easily prepare something (much better) at home for their next day lunch. My mom used to that for me when I was a kid, like most moms would do back then, and I have done that countless times when I used to work normal office hours and had a very busy job.
I eat fast food on every road trip. I don’t really travel for the food in random small towns on the way. So if I get hungry, I get either gas station food or fast food.
It’s not because it’s good, it’s because it’s fast.
BK is always trash though. Bucc-ees is relatively good, so is Quik Trip. And Dunkin makes pretty good iced coffees for a decent price.
I think most people only have shit fast food near them as a convenience food. I traveled through the south a lot last year and realized that most of the country must just be massive suburbs separated by strip malls and fast food buildings. Even brand new developments are all banks and Culver’s or some crap.
It’s a stark contrast to urbanized areas. We get so much more in options for convenience food that I don’t even consider fast food as existing.
We dont like your kind here
We are all like a family here, you wouldn’t understand
God fearing people!
🤡
Some people like the taste and don’t mind paying for the convenience - full stop.
Also the vegetarian option at most fast food places is generally more expensive and worse tasting
Stop calling it food
Stop gatekeeping food.
It’s not food.
What is your definition of food? Because it certainly fits mine and the dictionary’s.
any nutritious substance that people or animals eat or drink or that plants absorb in order to maintain life and growth
Fast food in general is neither nutritious nor does it particularly maintain life and growth. Arguably it does the opposite.
Mainly fast food is a profit center for the industrialized food chain. It’s designed to maximize the extractable value from cheap raw ingredients through extensive processing and to provide a sustainable revenue stream for large corporations by fucking with your body’s natural taste and diet control mechanisms.
If you want good food fast then you are far better making it yourself or if you are not able to do that, finding a taco truck or similar independent vendor who does not rely on highly processed crap disguised as “food”. In many parts of the world street vendors are common and personally I want to encourage that as much as possible.
People want to make my comments out to be some kind of elitist blah blah whatever when in fact they are the opposite. My desire is to strongly encourage people to maintain their food independence and health and to stop supporting huge corporations out of convenience and ignorance.
any nutritious substance that people or animals eat or drink or that plants absorb in order to maintain life and growth
By that definition Burger King is food, you can survive on it and gain enough nutritional value to allow you to grow.
Fast food in general is neither nutritious nor does it particularly maintain life and growth. Arguably it does the opposite.
It’s not as nutritious as home made cooking, but claiming it has no nutrition is factually inaccurate.
I’m not saying it is good for you, or that you can survive eating only whoppers (but you also can’t survive eating the same salad over and over so it’s a moot point). But by any definition of the word Burger King and other fast foods are food, extremely calorically dense and filled to the brim with saturated fat food.
By that definition Burger King is food, you can survive on it and gain enough nutritional value to allow you to grow.
Technically, dirt contains some nutritional value. So yeah, you are correct that fast food does contain some nutrition. Eating a diet of strictly potatoes will, technically, allow you to “grow” but like industrial fast food, will come with adverse health consequences. So the question isn’t if it technically has some amount of nutritional value but whether it’s actually good for you. Does the “food” allow you to maintain life and grow to a degree consistent with the average seems to me to be a reasonable definition.
A diet with a lot of fast food is nutritionally poor and full of many things such as sugar, salt, and saturated fats that cause long-term adverse health consequences. It’s been linked to everything from a lower capacity for memory and learning to diabetes, heart disease and of course obesity.
There is simply no way that you can say that fast food is “good” for you or that it should be eaten routinely. Making the clear distinction that fast “food” is not food to the same degree as a healthful diet is one of the best things you can do for community health.
I never said it’s healthy or that someone should eat it regularly, so that’s a strawman. But it is still food, with much higher nutritional value than dirt, and it can definitely sustain you, which you yourself admitted, so by that same definition you gave fast food is food.
It is only 80% food tbh
Pre-pandemic it was cheap and fast and 24/7 and there were genuine quality items you could get if you knew them and as long as you’re not some moron who buys fries/meals and only solo main items, like chicken legend at McDonald’s.
I would walk for 5 min at like 3AM or whenever felt right in central London and have a £4 meal back at my flat. Cheap, quick and easy.
Now it’s all gone, it’s three times as expensive, all the good items have been removed like the aforementioned example and they shut at 6pm. It’s just worthless.
Now I WFH rurally, used to go to subway for a quick breakfast on busy days because it was a 10 mins walk, but they shut too and now it’s some shitty asian restaurant or German kitchen place
Also a vegetarian. I love the salt, the fried and the fast. I hate cooking enough that I’ll work and exercise more to outrun as many of the negative aspects as possible.
As a vegetarian the only thing I would eat at a fast food restaurant is french fries. I haven’t found a decent veggie burger or other options at a fast food place.
I feel slightly less dirty afterwards than at McDonald’s…
I eat it on occasion. I actually really like the taste of Burger King burgers, but I have internalized the fact that the burger I like is 1800 calories by itself, with another 400-500 for the fries, and for that reason, I don’t eat it often. I also have to take into account that, yes, it’s expensive stuff now.
My parents raised me on fast food so I probably enjoy it more than most due to the aspect of being conditioned to it.
We have multiple Burger Kings, and one of them is actually as good as I remember from being a kid. It is also the one with a high proportion of middle age workers who have worked there for years.
There is an overall trend of fast food declining in quality for sure, and my guess is that most people haven’t eaten at one of the few remaining places that still do a decent job with stocking and staffing.
I don’t go to BK regularly, but can confirm my experience with their Impossible burger was also disappointing.
