Karlonia.com

Earlier today, I received an email tip about an interesting photo experiment at thewvsr.com that compared different types of fast food items with their images that are broadcast on television and in print advertisements. Perhaps not surprisingly, the actual foods do not look as attractive as they do in the ads, but in some cases there is a pretty substantial difference.

As many people in this topic’s Digg thread pointed out, the comparison seems somewhat biased due to the varying quality of the photos for the actual products; some of the pictures on the right are noticeably blurry. Even after taking this factor into account, however, it’s clear that the carefully crafted images of food that we see on posters or in the TV commercials do not stack up to the reality of the fast food industry. In addition to the obvious differences in appearance, some of the commentators from the Digg thread who actually worked in fast food restaurants have provided us with some further enlightenment about what to watch out for when ordering fast food items. The thread itself has gotten rather long, so I will summarize some of the most informative tidbits below:

Meanwhile, buried in the middle of the Digg thread was another site that covered the topic of fast food ads vs. reality. This niche blog site at badfoodad.com seems to do a better job of making a fair comparison between the two images. For the most part, the photography is a little better, and the author includes more descriptive content and even assigns an overall letter grade for each product entry. This blog has a good start, but unfortunately it has not been updated for a few months, so its future development at this point is uncertain.