Last weekend, I went to Door County, Wisconsin, for a beautiful outdoor wedding. It was the wedding of my friends Matt and Jessica. They are wonderful and I am very happy they got married. I went without a date as usual and was very sad because I had no one to slow dance with. Then I went outside and looked at the lake wistfully. It was very wistful, the way I wistfully looked at the lake, wistfully.
“Dannis,” you say, “It is a wedding. Where are all the single ladies you should have danced with?”
Well, the truth is, most people I know now are married or in committed 3-way relationships. All I have is Cricket, my beautiful cat, and this is the saddest sentence ever written in the long and storied history of mankind.
Anyway, this is the best story I’ve ever written. But in Door County I did not have cell reception so I could not text or tweet about penises as usual. But as soon as I got back to Sweet Home Chicago, I received a frantic flurry of texts, tweets, Facebook messages, and emails. Unsurprisingly, these messages were specifically regarding poo. Also, Burger King.
Burger King has recently released a limited-time sandwich called the Halloween Whopper.
This culinary abomination is not much different from a regular Whopper. It features a disappointing ground up charred cow disc, American cheese, pickles, onions, tomatoes, ketchup, and A.1. sauce. However, the interesting thing about this burger is that it has an A.1.-flavored bun that is dyed completely black.
Now, the black-bunned Whopper is not a new concept. Burger King has actually released multiple versions in Japan; the bread is dyed with squid ink, which is jet-black and will stain your clothes and food into the color of my soul. People use squid ink to also dye pasta a terrifying shade of onyx, so it’s not particularly a new trick.
However, the messages that people sent me were very entertaining. It turns out that this monstrosity from Burger King, may, in fact, dye your poo bright green, as evidenced by the following tweets:
Dear @BurgerKing, yesterday I ate a Halloween whopper and now the color of my poop is blue green. Where my brown poo? pic.twitter.com/IVthvPpNNQ
— Smokey Martling (@SmokeyMartling) October 3, 2015
“Where my brown poo?”
Yesterday I had the Halloween Whopper… Today my poop is green. Yesterday was the last time I'll have the Halloween Whopper.
— Daniel Rodriguez (@Danny_Seth) October 4, 2015
This Buzzfeed article outlines many people’s reactions to their interesting green poo after eating the Halloween Whopper. In fact, there’s even a photo of green poo on that page (don’t worry, it’s censored unless you click on it)! This is why five people were trying to get a hold of me when I was in Wisconsin.
Since I was gone all weekend, it was difficult for me to do a recipe post for this week. Plus, there was a lot of demand from my friends and family regarding this hypothetical green poo.
So I said to myself, “Dannis Ree, you need to eat one of these shitty-looking Whoppers so you can report back to the curious world about the resulting color of your feces, as you have a food blog that usually ends up being about poo when it is supposed to be about cool food.”
Okay!
I went to my local Burger King and purchased three Halloween Whoppers. One of them was for my roommate, Craig, who is co-host of a very important craft beer podcast called ABV Chicago. The other two were for me.
The wrapper on the Halloween Whopper is supposed to be spooky and so it is the face of a mummy. I am not sure that the children of today even know what mummies are. I personally do not believe mummies are very scary. Your mother’s face highly resembles that of a mummy, and I have to sometimes look at that face, but since she is usually face-down on the bed it doesn’t matter much.
The actual burger is pretty spooky.
Just look at that black sesame seed-speckled bun! Harvey and Mr. Bee did not know what to make of it. They voiced their concerns but since they are stuffed animals I ignored their pleas for me to stop.
Well, I ate the goddamn thing. The Halloween Whopper tastes exactly like a normal Whopper, except for the addition of A.1. sauce. The bun supposedly has A.1. flavoring baked into it, but aside from a faint tart flavor it is very hard to discern. You’re really not missing out, but as my roommate exclaimed gleefully, “The fun comes out the other end!”
If you kept count earlier, you’ll note that I bought three of these stupid-ass Whoppers.
One was for Craig, and the other TWO were for me. I threw away the innards of the second Whopper and simply ate the bun after eating an entire Halloween Whopper. You see, I wanted to be very thorough in my investigation, plus I am calorie-conscious and do not want to die early as a rotund Korean man.
I even shared some of the Halloween bun with Cricket. As an investigative journalist, I wanted to see if her poo would turn green too. Is this animal abuse? Did I just admit to animal abuse?
Now, to speed up this process, I decided to pump fiber laxative into my system. This Dannis Ree specialty technique is known as “The Wall of Poo.”
The Wall of Poo is a maneuver in which you ingest fiber immediately after eating a meal, creating a “wall” of poo that pushes food out of your system much more quickly. This particular fiber product, similar to Metamucil, is made from psyllium seed husk. These husks are indigestible, and absorb an outrageous amount of water, bulking them up into a strange slime, which is why you have to drink this product so quickly. Otherwise it will turn into a solid gel in your glass. It is a very effective laxative product and creates enormous turds. So naturally, I took a double dose, which I highly do not recommend because I love you.
Back to wedding talk — one of my cousins got married years ago when I was in college. During college I did many stupid things like bleach my hair. Yes, I was one of those Asian kids. I looked like a dumb Korean Billy Idol. My cousin asked me to be an usher at her wedding, which I obliged to, but my mother was horrified at my blonde tips because my hair had grown out. To remedy this, I decided to dye my hair black again.
What I did not know is that if you don’t dye blond hair long enough with black dye, it turns green. I ended up with green-tipped hair and looked even worse, much to the chagrin of my mother. With my scientific knowledge of dye from personal experience, I believe that this green poo phenomenon is related. If you spread out dark dye in material in a larger volume of substance such as poo, you will get its actual base color; in this case, it is likely that the black bun’s dye is actually extremely dark green.
As you can see I am extremely well-versed in things that a food writer should not be well-versed in. But poo is a result of eating, and so this is the great circle of life.
Now, the waiting game.
During this time, I reread old Pizzle posts like Jerked Cock and Balls Soup and did a lot of jumping jacks until it was time for bed. When I went to sleep I felt like a kid again, going to bed the night before Christmas, except my gift would end up in the toilet.
After I woke up this morning, I headed to the doctor’s office for an appointment, hoping I would green-bomb the office toilet. But it did not happen. Instead, as I walked back from the train, I felt the call of nature in my rear end, as the brown caterpillar tried to punch its way out like Chuck Norris on speed. So I sprinted home the rest of the way like a champion and power-dumped my way into history.
Don’t worry, I will not post a picture of actual poo on The Pizzle. I’ve already been blocked at so many offices I do not want to get you in trouble for looking at what some filters might consider “scat-related.”
Instead, I have chosen to draw you a simulation of what happened.
As you all can see, I am a master of graphic design. And, if you haven’t surmised by the photo — it worked. It fucking worked. Burger King’s Halloween Whopper turns your poo a strange shade of bright blue-green. This is like dinner and a show, except the show happens the next day. I am surprised no one caught this during the testing process of the sandwich, although I do not think they have reports about what happens after you eat Burger King since most people already know it gives you diarrhea. I am sure the focus group participants were too embarrassed to tell the culinary development team about this turn of events.
One of my friends, Rachel, remarked after trying it herself that “It looked like the toilet water turned into Windex.” While I would not like to clean my windows with this particular water, she is spot-on.
Did Cricket’s bowel movement turn green? Well, it’s too early to tell right now. She hasn’t dropped a heinous deuce yet. I doubt that she’ll have the same result because she ate so little of the bun, but digging through the litter box for the worst buried treasure ever is probably just too much for this blog, because as you know, as a food writer, I have standards.
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