"supersize me" news and stories

I've never heard of the chain of restaurants named Max, probably because I live here in the U.S. The Swedish chain is one of the vital ingredients in the mission taken on by a guy named Johan, who has lost a lot of weight eating food from the chain (and exercising!) and is trying to lose even more (there's a few days left in his 90 day experiment to lose 20 kg - I have no idea how much 20 kg is. Readers?).

The blog's name is MinimizeMe, a takeoff on Morgan Spurlock's SuperSize Me movie, where he ate nothing but McDonald's food for a month and ruined his health (though I have serious problems with the way he did it). Max Restaurants are actually known for trying to get people to eat healthier.

[via The Grinder]

Before there was Supersize Me, before Eric Schlosser penned Fast Food Nation, Matt Malmgren was busy acquiring Big Macs for his Burger Museum. According to a video that has spread like wildfire throughout the blogosphere, Malmgren purchased two McDonald's hamburgers on Jan. 1, 1989. He ate one and placed the other in his jacket pocket and forgot about it. A year later the video tells us in large red text "It looked and smelled EXACTLY the same!"

Since nobody believed him, gasp, he proceeded to amass more burgers and now has the world's largest, and probably the only, collection of
Immortal Big Macs, double cheeseburgers and hamburgers. As an ominous soundtrack plays, the video lists the "secret ingredients" that make such immortality possible. Among them are 1,1,1-trichloroethane, chloroform, ethyl benzene, styrene and toluene. In the interest of full disclosure, it also notes that the ingredients were taken from the FDA's report on pesticide residues in fast food. The Web site that hosts the video even has directions on how to make your own Immortal Hamburger. It bears pointing out the Web site, Best Day Ever, is a promotional vehicle for a raw foods guru. [via Neatorama]

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The last thing on your mind once you slowly slip into a food coma after the Big Feast tomorrow is getting up and doing anything active. In my family, it invites all kinds of things like the same stories from relatives, arguments, and questions from Mom and Dad about each of our plans for our futures. The best thing for my sanity, then, is to pop in a DVD to keep everyone quiet and entertained. While there are plenty of movies out there, we at Slashfood are, naturally, particularly fond of movies that have to do with food. Blogger Sean Timberlake has compiled a list of his favorite food movies, some of which are pictured above (each box links to Sean's review).

There are a few more on his list, but what are your favorites? Or are we just overdoing it a little, since the last thing you want to do after stuffing yourself is watching someone else do it on the screen for another two hours?

Fast Food Nation, the movie based on Eric Schlosser's book about America's food industry in relation to fast food, is currently in production. I thoroughly enjoyed Schlosser's book, and was captured by the level of detailed research he put into the text. The movie has just been picked up by Fox Searchlight, and it will not be a documentary. Rather, it will be a character study based on facts. I think this will be an interesting movie, and a little more riveting than Super Size Me, which I thought had some biases in its execution. Hopefully they don't mangle a lot of the factual information presented in the book.