Shudder and Hide: Revolting Depictions of Food

I can barely watch professional football anymore - and it only has a little bit to do with the current plight of the home team.

Insidiously embedded in nearly every broadcast appealing to the young male demo - and especially football - is that unspeakably disgusting Taco Bell commercial for some ersatz food product. "Which one?" you say. Point taken. But this is a particularly egregious example characterized by unsightly and impossibly long strands of cheese linking the offending food object and some idiot's mouth. In the background, lyrics by Modern English. I can view bloody horror films, embarrassing family videos or even golf. Nothing evokes such an autonomic reaction. These pictures of foodish material are so revolting as to bring on panic, a loss of vestibular senses and cause me to bury my face into a nearby pillow or person.

I simply cannot watch this dreck without having a violent physical reaction. That someone, somewhere thought that carefully constructed images of such a disturbing food product could somehow encourage purchase of same, well...

Anyway, I am sure that you all have similar triggers. Speak up, share, and maybe we can heal together.

i feel the same way about watching commercials for the baconator (i forget which chain is selling this monstrosity). i'm vegetarian, but even when i wasn't, there is NO WAY that i would ever eat something that excessive. everytime i see a commercial for it i am revolted and my stomach feels disgustingly heavy as though the burger somehow magically transported from the tv screen into my stomach.

(KFC)

Definitely much more horrifying when being eaten on a commercial, with corn-encrusted cheese dribbles...I, too, feel your pain gastro gnome.

that unspeakably disgusting Taco Bell commercial for some ersatz food product. "Which one?" you say. Point taken. But this is a particularly egregious example characterized by unsightly and impossibly long strands of cheese linking the offending food object and some idiot's mouth.

Yeah, and they taste terrible, too!

I mean, they look like they taste terrible. Ahem.

gastro gnome wrote:I can barely watch professional football anymore - and it only has a little bit to do with the current plight of the home team.

Insidiously embedded in nearly every broadcast appealing to the young male demo - and especially football - is that unspeakably disgusting Taco Bell commercial for some ersatz food product. "Which one?" you say. Point taken. But this is a particularly egregious example characterized by unsightly and impossibly long strands of cheese linking the offending food object and some idiot's mouth. In the background, lyrics by Modern English. I can view bloody horror films, embarrassing family videos or even golf. Nothing evokes such an autonomic reaction. These pictures of foodish material are so revolting as to bring on panic, a loss of vestibular senses and cause me to bury my face into a nearby pillow or person.

I simply cannot watch this dreck without having a violent physical reaction. That someone, somewhere thought that carefully constructed images of such a disturbing food product could somehow encourage purchase of same, well...

Anyway, I am sure that you all have similar triggers. Speak up, share, and maybe we can heal together.

nothing to add except that I, too, find that particular Taco Hell commercial unwatchable; jiggling, ropy skeins of phlegm...yum!

I hate those Taco Bell ads too...horrible.

Though not realted to food, except the two times I threw my Polish sausage at the TV screen, I cannot remember hating anything in recent memory more than the "This is Our Country" ads sung by John Mellencamp. I think there are about 10 iterations of ads with this tune. I HATE IT! I used to like Mellencamp...I cannot stand him now.

Talk about beating the hell out of a dead horse...the tune actually isn't bad but they've used the same tune so many times that I absolutely cringe when an ad runs with this song. And, because I have the NFL Sunday ticket getting all the NFL games each week, I think a conservative estimate would be hearing at least some portion of an ad with this tune no less than 50 times each Sunday.

ARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!

Bster

Patton Oswalt's bit on the KFC Bowls is hilarious. It's on his newest album Werewolves and Lollipops. He sums them up pretty well. I could upload an MP3 if people are interested.

That taco bell commercial is annoying.

Bring back the BK commercials with the King playing football.

Mhays wrote: (KFC)

Definitely much more horrifying when being eaten on a commercial, with corn-encrusted cheese dribbles...I, too, feel your pain gastro gnome.

See, but that picture is lip-smacking good when compared to what you actually get at KFC

I'm not really a TV watcher; the television I have at home gets just three fuzzy channels. I watch most of my TV at the gym on the small screens fixed to the treadmills. While running at the gym on Saturday, I realized just how many food commercials there are on every channel. Imagine the images already mentioned--Taco Bell, KFC...--on a 17'' screen just a few feet from your face while exercising. Really unpleasant. Actually, it was the KFC commercials this past weekend that made me determined to figure out how to turn off those treadmill screens. (Full disclosure: I had a big Chicken Shack dinner on Friday night, so I realize that probably didn't help me on the treadmill with the KFC commercials on Saturday morning. )

Yeah, those KFC bowls, also the Uncle Ben's bowls advertised a year or so ago were completely stomach-turning to me.

Frankly, I also find the extreme close-ups on the posters on the windows of most McDonald's revolting. All of them.

And yet there's the purely subjective element: walking by the sidewalk section of some outdoor cafe this weekend, I was struck in quick succession by a) how disgusting the half-eaten plates in front of people seemed to me, as I watched them scrape and shovel various things together, and, then, b) the reflection that those plates looked no different from my own plate when I'm the one chowing down.
Same with walking by a bus pan in a restaurant. The same plate that looks disgusting perched on top of the bus pan, was, 10 saconds ago, merely the end of a fine meal, sitting on a table in front of people to whom it wasn't at all off-putting as they polished off their last 2 bites.

Funny, even though I posted to this thread, I'd never seen the aforementioned commercial until today - it's gross, but whatever they're using to depict cheese is so factory-precise in every shot that it's got to be some kind of rubber appliance. Oddly, the idea of somebody with a faux-rubber soft taco isn't as gross as what I imagine the real thing would be - at least you couldn't be expected to eat it. I suppose that's not exactly the reaction Taco Bell hoped for.

Fujisan wrote:See, but that picture is lip-smacking good when compared to what you actually get at KFC

You ain't kidding! I found it difficult to believe that they were worse in person...but that picture speaks much louder than I could (I did NOT put one of those things to my lips; but watched, horrified, as a friend ate one in a car)

Mhays wrote:Funny, even though I posted to this thread, I'd never seen the aforementioned commercial until today - it's gross, but whatever they're using to depict cheese is so factory-precise in every shot that it's got to be some kind of rubber appliance.

It's CG. And bad CG, at that.

Fujisan wrote:See, but that picture is lip-smacking good when compared to what you actually get at KFC

Man, that is digusting. It looks like some rare species of slime mold. People actually eat that $#!%? Even David "I'll eat anything twice" Hammond wouldn't touch that.

Dmnkly wrote:It's CG. And bad CG, at that.

I'm afraid you have sold it short. It's not just bad. It's malevolent.

I wish I could download the video...but...Joe's Crab Shack commercial...who was the malevolent entity that came up with Sweet & Sticky Crab?

I think the first law of Taco Bell is that food doesn't have to be good as long as it's "melty".
>>Brent