The West Michigan Whitecaps recently unveiled their new stadium menu and gloating at the top of it is the 4489 Calorie “Fifth Third Burger.” This 1.66 pound piece of gastrointestinal wunder, named after team sponsor 5/3 Bank, costs $20 and feeds 1-4 people. If you eat it by yourself and finish it in one sitting, you get a free 5/3 tshirt. Said the team’s marketing director, “It’s something fun that people can understand.”
1.66666667 Pounds [BensBizBlog via Sports Biz]
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I hope the free t-shirt comes in XXXL!
“and by ‘understand’, we mean ‘rupture their lower GI tract with’”
Makes me glad I am a vegetarian!
@Plates:
Now I’m tempted to make one with Garden Burgers or, even moar bettar, Grillers Prime.
@howie_in_az: Mmmmm. Grillers. Probably one of the best veggie burgers ever.
Makes me wanna puke.
/ruining a perfectly good burger with mayo
@Plates: makes me consider becoming a vegeterian
@Plates: Can you get off that high horse for a second so we can cook and eat it?
Looks like a garbage plate on a bun. Anyone else here ever been to Tahou’s?
@tc4b: Garbage plates and Genessee beer-only in Rochester.
@Coles_Law: Blah! I need buns with my hamburgers. Gimmie a Zweigles redhot, I miss ‘em.
@tc4b: Heck Yes.
I… I’m frightened.
When is 5/3 Bank going to break down that goddamned fraction?!
@rpm773: 1.66 repeating bank?
@mgy: That, or at the very least “1 2/3 Bank”. It’s just wrong!
@rpm773: I always wonder if they’re just avoiding admitting they’re actually Fifteenth Bank.
@floraposte:
…i alwasy wonder about people who put their money in a bank that appears to lack a basic grasp of arithmetic…
@YouDidWhatNow?: I think they were founded on the corner of 5th and 3rd Streets/Avenues/Whatever.
@Eyebrows McGee (on Twitter: LPetelle): I think I like that idea better than the real(ish) one:
@drjayphd: Man, the real story IS lame!
I swear my mother told me about the 5th and 3rd streets thing … which means it’s like the time she told me the cat “ran away” to a “better home.”
I would like to eat this burger, it must be lunch time
Is that supposed to be chili on the bottom layer? Looks more like refried beans.
@BustedFlush: Well what do you expect, it’s Michigan’s version of chili
@BustedFlush: Thats chili? It looks better as refried beans rather than chili.
@BustedFlush: “I like refried beans. That’s why I wanna try fried beans, because maybe they’re just as good and we’re just wasting time. You don’t have to fry them again after all.”
Considering most venues charge $4.50 for a hot dog, $20 for this thing seems like quite a steal.
@ceilingFANBOY: That was my thought; the last time I bought stadium food (at a minor-league hockey game!) it was $11 for a hot dog and a beer. $20 for a burger that can feed 3-4 people is a steal.
When are we as Americans going to realize that we need to stop incentivizing our own obesity. We put stupid, health detrimental accomplishments on pedestals and garnish the “heros” with awards. As the leading and preventable cause of death in the country, these things are not simply “fun.”
The marketing people pushing products that are obvious contributers to the problem need to take a step back and consider their effect.
But oh wait, they wouldn’t care: they’re capitalists in a capitalist society.
$ > Human well-being.
Hard to break away from those fundamentals, huh.
@milaround:
I’m pretty sure this is not a significant contributor to the weight problems or potential weight problems of those who eat it, because they probably are not eating one every day, or even every week.
Ugh. I like burgers, and I find this thing disgusting.
@superberg: Agreed. That thing just looks nasty. Who the hell would want to eat all of that just for a free shirt.
This is a major problem in our society: There’s this competition amongst restaurants/food providers to produce the biggest, most fat filled, greasiest crap imaginable.
Why??? I don’t get it.
@dragonfire81: This is why:
@ChuckECheese: I was thinking that the Good Morning Burger started all this…
@varro: That’s just a load of rich, creamery butter!
@dragonfire81: There’s this competition amongst restaurants/food providers to produce the biggest, most fat filled, greasiest crap imaginable so that Food TV Network will send Guy Fieri to do a story on it and tell us how “money” it is.
FIFY.
@HurtsSoGood:
Guy makes me laugh. He says almost the exact same thing with everything he tries.
“Oh… the spices are just… wow!” along with other phrases that don’t really mean anything.
I am envious though that his job is to go around eating stuff.
@CubeRat: It’s good work if you can get it. Guy won his in a reality show.
I just love making fun of Food Network people, especially the fat ones who measure butter by the stick, or think pork fat is the best kind to cook with.
@HurtsSoGood:
I would love to have his job. Or the guy that goes around trying to win eating challenges (Man vs. Food, I think).
One of the shows I actually enjoy watching though is the “Good Eats” one.
@CubeRat: “Good Eats” is one of my favorites, too. Guess I’m just one of those people that likes to get some education with my recipes.
@scarletvirtue: My wife and I watch it together all the time. Educational and very entertaining.
@dragonfire81: You don’t have to get it.
“It’s something fun that people can understand.”
What, a heart attack? real fun.
If these people weren’t insistent that you HAVE to eat the tomatoes, I would have a closet full of t-shirts.
Looks good to me
Restaurants seemed to have figured out that to get free advertising via the “news” all they have to do is either stack a bunch of food into a big pile or include an expensive gemstone to make the price outrageous.
The Big Texan Steak Ranch is not amused.
Does your heart get a bailout?
This is why all of my neighbors are fat, huh?
What, did they have previous contests that confused people? What’s with that “people can understand” bit?
Also, is that a fried chicken patty below the burger? And why is all that white stuff on the outside of the burger? And who’s supposed to want to try to split a burger four ways?
@Rectilinear Propagation: It looks like some kind of nacho burger. Refried beans at the bottom and the “white stuff” is sour cream.
ooh, i think i just threw up… and then put it on a bun, called it a burger, and sold it at Whitecaps
Yes, yes, plenty of fat jokes, this burger gives you a heart attack, etc. Enough already.
None of it’s true. Eating one of these (even by yourself) on rare occasion will have zero impact on your health. It’s the crap people eat every day that does the damage.
So go ahead and enjoy it if you want to.
@zarex42: +1.
If you honestly think your body holds onto to each and every one of those calories, and turns this into 1.4lbs of fat instantly, then yes, eating this makes you fat. But, uh, it doesn’t happen like that.
@Single-n-Bitter_GitEmSteveDave: You need about 1200-1500 calories a day, depending on your weight, to support your average American sedentary lifestyle. The rest will most assuredly go to fat as soon as your G-I system gets around to processing it. That is, assuming you can hork the whole thing down in the first place.
@HurtsSoGood: I believe it’s called the “Basal” rate or something that says how much you burn in an average day to just “exist”. Last I checked, for my size and activity range, it’s like 2400 calories daily.
@HurtsSoGood: I snoozed during biology… isn’t there a maximum limit to the amount of time a mass of food can, uh… “be processed”, in the G-I tract?
Coming from a math-science background, I’m assuming there’s a limit to how many calories/nutrients you can absorb per hour… multiply that by the maximum time food can spend in the tract and you get the “upper-limit” of calorie intake and anything left after would happily, um, “passed.”
@Applekid: One of my brothers bases his Thanksgiving intake on this theory. I think he claims the upper limit is like 800 calories in one sitting that can be absorbed.
@Eyebrows McGee (on Twitter: LPetelle): Just make sure he doesn’t watch that one episode of South Park where Cartman discovers a new way to eat.
@Applekid: Well, the G-I tract expands and reduces capacity as needed. Take, for example, the 800 pound wonders you see now and then on the Discovery Channel. They require a truly astounding number of calories to keep from starving to death. They have an amazing capacity for eating – you’d throw up before finishing the first course of what some of them eat. The truly insidious part is that you can’t just put a person like that on a 1200 calorie diet like you could an ordinary garden-variety fatass – like me. You’d kill him. Seriously.
Yeah, I suspect you’d probably crap a good portion of that monster burger undigested. I wouldn’t want to be the guy in the next stall while you did that, though. HOWEVER, if you are capable of putting away that volume of groceries at a sitting, it’s a good bet that you do it fairly often, and are quite capable of digesting whatever you put down there, skinny Japanese hot dog eating champion notwithstanding.
@zarex42: If you ate this burger over the course of, say, a week, it would not have the same impact as eating it at once. Your body stores energy based on the amount given to it at the time of consumption, therefore eating it in one sitting will cause huge amounts of fat-storage. Concentration IS important. For example, there are certain levels of lead, arsenic and other dangerous poisons allows in the water supply because at certain levels they are not harmful. If in high enough concentrations, however, they will cause cancer, death, etc. The same goes for saturated fats. The cholesterol spike caused by this will cause permanent damage to your arteries if you live and maintain a sedentary lifestyle. Basically, if you eat this burger in one sitting, be prepared to workout 2 hrs a day for the next week or face the long-term consequences.
Looks awesome to me.. all the haters here need to go eat some soy.
I just can’t help myself: the restrooms are going to need ‘bailouts’ after people eat these!
har har har.
You know, when I was in college, people would eat that much food at the all-you-can-eat cafeteria buffet quite often. Some kids would rim their trays in mountain dew and then take one of everything.
A ‘normal’ sized version of that seems like it might be tasty, though. Chili burger!
Why the hell does it have tortilla chips on it… wtf is thiS?! Also it looks like it has several small burger patties, not just 1 big one. Still wtf with the chips!?
@IR1: Yeah, I concur. I could get on board with most of the stuff on that thing as being interesting if not wholly excellent accents to a burger. But tortilla chips are all wrong, texturally and flavor-wise.
@jackbishop: The grease will soften them up quite a bit by the time it reaches your table.
TACO TOWN
@Charlotte Rae’s Web:
*lol* I know, right? All this monstrosity needs is to be wrapped in a pancake then deep-fried, and it could be featured in another SNL sketch
I live in West Michigan and am PROUD that my home-state came up with this tongue-in-cheek indulgence in excess and gluttony. (No really!)
“Something fun that people can understand”. Do they really think we are all Homer? And THEY are calling US stupid.
That’s pretty revolting, but I’d still take it over a patty of congealed soy juice.
Sorry, folks, it’s not soy milk – soy doesn’t have boobs. I checked.
MMMmmmmm. Breakfast. Followed by a nice three hour workout.
That is not a burger. That is a travesty.
Time to send an email to http://www.thisiswhyyourefat.com
@MitchEvious: That site is inspiring and makes me proud to be an American (though there are a few from outside the country).
I could totally down one of those in no time at all. I must be hungry.
And Kaellorian, AMEN to that. The most infuriating thing is at my college’s dining hall, they have soy “milk,” gluten-free “milk,” and one other fake milk right next to the coffee, but NO FRIGGIN’ HALF-AND-HALF!
Is anyone else bothered by places like Flatbread Pizza where half of the menu is devoted to what the ingredients are “free” of?
Wow! Now that’s a serious burger! Lets hope some liberals don’t decide to some tofu on it.
Should we be expecting to see this on an upcoming episode of Man VS Food?
oh god I want it.
I need healthier eating habits, man. I see a burger and my salivary glands go into overdrive.
It is simpler to serve up gimmicks like this than to think of something original and good for people.
It seems that banks haven’t learned their lesson about encouraging people to consume in excess, regardless of the long-term consequences.
“Here’s your redonkulous jumbo burger. Would you like a jumbo mortgage to go with that? And our dessert special today is this irresistible pineapple upside-down HELOCAKE.”
Wow, just wow. The bank that lost like $2.2 billion in value last year and being dicks to sensible people who want to refinance is promoting a disgusting, bad-eating-habit reinforcing burger. And if you finish it, they will give you a t-shirt. This makes me even more motivated to get my mortgage re-financed with another company.
mmm looks delicious… can I get a Diet Coke with that?
@tc4b Garbage plates and Kodak film…ahh, Rochester.
Just another reason the rest of the world hates us!
I just got off the phone with the Whitecaps (really). I told them they should get this thing its own Facebook page so you can become friends with this abomination.
Needs bacon
It’s a gastronomical Weapon of Mass Destruction!
Why would anyone bank at a company named for an irrational number?
@oneliketadow: 5/3 is rational by definition because it is a fraction, or as my discrete math professor said, “the ratio of two integers.” Pi is irrational, as is the square root of 2, but repeating fractions are perfectly rational.
“It’s something fun that people can understand.”
Why do I feel insulted by that statement?
Gury Fieri is the last person you want to see coming out of the stall when you’re waiting to go….
I guess the person who eats this will be the ultimate consumer-ist.
When I first glimpsed the headline, I thought it said FOOL in parentheses, not FOOD. I wouldn’t have been terribly wrong.
OK, here is why 5/3 Bank has the name it does:
[en.wikipedia.org]
jp7570 SAYS:
Just another reason the rest of the world hates us
===================================
Why, because we don’t live like a bunch of North Koreans and have the this unnatural need for the U.S. to win some sort of world popularity contest or love fest. If you want to be loved by the rest of the world, move to China, N. Korea, or Iran for that matter, or any one those communal countries. I bet you don’t. Meanwhile, we’ll remain behind and enjoy our decedent burgers!
@Barney_The Plug_ Frank: People who think the only alternative to their own disgusting decadence is absolute poverty really piss me off.
@Barney_The Plug_ Frank:
No, because it’s kinda decadent to have contests on consuming as many ressources as possible, especially when you’re already doing quite well in that regard.
In general, eating contests kinda sicken me as they are a collossal waste of effort and no practical application except sending a message of disregard for ressource consumption.
Obviously all the food consumed at eating contests in the entire US would hardly feed the hungry, but the message sent is kinda “We have so much food we have to have competitions to get rid of it.”
Regardless of whether your body absorbs it all or passes it, this thing still looks gross.
Things like this are the reason the rest of the world hates America.
@redskull: To be fair, probably not as gross as it’d look passed.
The world doesn’t hate America because we’re fat. They hate America because we insist on wearing tight sweatpants over our fat asses with the word “JUICY” written on them.
@Applekid: is Juicy on the tight sweat pants or on the ass itself. You were kind of vauge on that point.
That’s no burger. It’s a space station.