"super size me" news and stories

Hold the mayo. Hold the fries. Maybe hold everything. The guys who scared the hell out of us fast-food fans with the Oscar-nominated documentary Super Size Me are at it again. But don't wait up Sunday night to see if any Academy Awards are headed their way -- MTV's SplashPage reports that Supersized: Strange Tales from a Fast-Food Culture is a comic book this time. Director Morgan Spurlock and writer Jeremy Barlow penned the book, which hits shelves on March 9.

What can you expect from a fast-food comic book? Well-known graphic artists such as Lukas Ketner, Tony Millionaire and Ron English provide the illustrations, which at times are not so comic at all. The pages hold some original tales and also a few repeats spun out from Spurlock's movie. To kill time until then, why not queue up Super Size Me on Netflix. Or if you haven't seen them already, Fast Food Nation and Food, Inc. But don't expect to ever eat chicken again, much less fast food.

On Wednesday 1,500 cooks in Iran unveiled an attempt to smash Italy's Guinness Record for the world's largest ostrich sandwich. The event took place in Tehran's Mellet Park. At 4,920 feet, the humongous hero, which contained 1,543 pounds each of ostrich and chicken meat, easily beats the Italian record of 4,521 feet, set last May.

There's only one problem though. The sandwich was devoured in minutes by a hungry crowd before Guinness officials had a chance to measure it. The organizers are hoping that Guinness will accept video footage to authenticate the record.

It's a shame that something which took two days to prepare was gobbled up in mere minutes. The hero contained a mixture of ostrich and chicken meat with mustard and spices. The gigantic sandwich made from gigantic flightless birds was the brainchild of Tehran's city council along and a group of ostrich farmers. Ostrich meat is renowned for its flavor and is high in protein and low in cholesterol. Iran is the world's third-largest ostrich breeder behind South Africa and China.

Source

The Beer Barrel Belly Bruiser is so big that it looks like it might eat Brad Sciullo. Nonetheless the 21-year-old chef from Uniontown, Pa., took down the 15-pound burger along with 5 pounds of toppings in four hours and 39 minutes. For his efforts the 5-foot-11, 180-pound received $400, three T-shirts, a certificate and what the owner of Denny's Beer Barrel Pub calls "a burger hangover."

Sciullo is the first person to ever successfully eat this outlandishly huge burger within the 5-hour time limit. The colossal cheeseburger was dressed with lettuce, tomatoes, cheese, onions, mild banana peppers and a cup each of mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard and relish. Four hours and 39 minutes is a glacial pace compared with the people on the International Federation of Competitive Eaters circuit. The IFOCE is all about speed.

I'm guessing that Sciullo might spend a good 4 hours in the bathroom after eating that much ground beef. At least the chef doesn't have to face any burgers when he returns to work. He works at an Italian restaurant called Pasta Lorenzo's in Uniontown.

Source

I'm a huge fan of Korean food. It's spicy and so full of fresh, vibrant ingredients that I always feel superhealthy after eating it. So when I heard that a gigantic bowl of bibimbap would be served on the stretch of New York City's West 32 Street better known as Korea Way last Sunday I dropped everything and hopped on the subway. For those unfamiliar with Korean cuisine, bibimbap is a dish consisting of rice mixed with a wide array of ingredients. There's usually plenty of veggies, a bit of meat and there's always gojujang, a fiery chili pepper paste. The version that was served up to a hungry horde that day is known as Jeonju bibimbap. Before mixing the ingredients were laid out in a stunning visual display that used five colors (green, white, red, black and yellow) and resembled the Korean flag. The 507-pound bowl of bibimbap contained 19 ingredients and took 27 people 43 hours to prepare.

Conventional wisdom states that a nuclear apocalypse would leave two things on the planet Earth: cockroaches and Twinkies. To this equation, however, I feel obliged to add a third item: McDonald's hamburgers. As any fan of the double arches can attest, McDonald's burgers have a tendency to hover in the stomach, undigested, for a disturbingly long period of time. That, however, hardly qualifies them for Twinkie and cockroach status. After all, between Twinkies' incredible slate of preservatives and the cockroach's ingenious design, we're probably talking about the most impressive preservation technology imaginable. How could the humble McDonald's hamburger possibly compete?

Consider this: Karen Hanrahan, an Illinois educator and nutritional consultant, has a twelve-year old McDonald's hamburger that has yet to decay. After she purchased the burger in 1996, Ms. Hanrahan removed the meat from the bun and stored both parts in a cupboard in her house, occasionally taking them out to show to her various classes. While the bun has apparently become hard, it has not developed mold, nor has it been attacked by flies, ants, or other vermin. Meanwhile, the meat is shriveled but still recognizable.

There is some question about whether the burger's impressive longevity is due to preservatives, poisons, or merely McDonalds' state-of-the-art cleaning program, which keeps bacteria out of the restaurants. Regardless, I'd argue that Ms. Hanrahan has made it pretty clear that McDonalds' burgers are likely to last for the duration!