All that is wrong with the pub burger King 'Vietnamese'

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Advertising Burger King for its Vietnamese-inspired burger shows customers trying to eat with a pair of gigantic fancy chopsticks, which the New Zealand question why?

It's a crime against food

Food crimes take many forms: putting pineapple on a pizza, pouring milk before cereal and cutting Bagels sliced ​​like a loaf of bread. But the most heinous of all? Eat fast food with utensils. Is eating a burrito with a knife and fork correct? What about one? a pizza, as does Donald Trump? So, why would you like to eat a hamburger with chopsticks? There is a special place in hell reserved for people like that.

Vietnamese "burgers" already exist?

It's called banh mi and if you do not know it, you really miss the hole.

That's already done

Burger King does not know it very well, showing that Westernized food is eaten with chopsticks is so past. In fact, the Italian fashion house Dolce & Gabbana did it just a few months ago, by launching three short videos on the Chinese social media network Weibo, to promote its next Shanghai fashion show. The videos showed an Asian woman trying to eat pizzas, spaghetti and cannoli with chopsticks. With Chinese folk music in the background, a Mandarin voiceover says "Welcome to the first episode of" Eating with Chopsticks "Dolce & Gabbana" seems to have been pronounced in a way that: makes fun of Chinese speech.

Shortly after, Dolce & Gabbana was canceled. And not just Internet "canceled" but literally canceled when its parade of & # 39; one hour to Shanghai, which cost several million dollars, was canceled, mainly because Stefano Gabbana responded to the controversy by saying "the country of [series of poop emojis] is China ".

It's ignorant, it's lazy and it's wrong

Joking aside, Burger King's advertising is so wrong because it plays on lazy stereotypes based on orientalist traditions. The announcement first caught the public's attention when Maria Mo, a New Zealander-Korean, voiced her grievances about it. Twitter.

In the context of advertising, chopsticks – a daily tool used by more than a billion people around the world – have become primitive, clumsy and, to put it mildly, absurd. Their larger than life size exaggerates these qualities and highlights the "exoticism" and "foreignness" of Asian things. It's also strangely offensive for non-Asians who are apparently the only ones stupid enough to eat a hamburger with chopsticks just because it's "Vietnamese".

Even worse, it turns out that the ad posted on Twitter is actually part of a longer video promoting Burger King's new Tastes of the World lineup. The full 30-second clip shows not only people trying to eat a hamburger with chopsticks, but also boxing gloves (for the American burger) and robotic hands (for the Japanese burger 'tonkatsu').

But the biggest gag of all is that the ASA actually ordered the removal of advertising last month, not for reasons related to cultural insensitivity, but because the last remark of the advertisement ("It only misses three others!") normalized what it believed to be "excessive consumption". Although the advertisement was taken from television screens, the full clip was available on Burger King's Facebook page. until it was removed earlier today, shortly after The Spinoff contacted the ASA about it.

It is clear that companies such as Burger King are provoking. In January, Burger King was also in trouble for an ad imitating drug use. The previous month, he had received complaints for showing someone cooking in a car.

We understand that modern advertising is about being nervous and cool. But an ad showing an Asian burger & # 39; eating with chopsticks or robotic hands n & # 39; is not even that – c & # 39; is just a lazy, like "Chirri Garrick Dumpring a shrimp", like "lazy, waving Kimmy Jong" lazy. Many people will be angry, but most of us will be tired. We are in 2019: do we really need to explain why it's not funny anymore?

The food content of Spinoff is brought to you by Liberty Farms. They believe that talking about food is almost as much fun as eating it and they are happy to facilitate good conversations around where food comes from in Aotearoa, New Zealand.

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