This week’s ad:  Pizza Hut Tuscani Pasta

It’s no secret we are, as Ali G so delicately put it, a nation of “fatty boom-booms”.   And anyone who’s flipped through that Michael Pollan book their aunt gave them as a birthday gift knows that the profits of AMERICAN FATTY FOOD INC. have been plateauing.  Yes, we’ve become much more informed about what we put into our bodies (thanks interwebs!), marginally less lazy (thanks, Jillian and Bob!), but making Americans fat is an industry with limited long-term growth prospects.  Gillette will be ok because hair never stops growing, but our stomachs can only expand so much.

So what do our favorite fatteries do?  Strategies vary wildly.  Some have said, “F*ck it, we know you’re weak.”  Others assuage your guilt with apple slices to get you to the door, knowing you’ll switch to the quarter-pounder with extra McFlurry once inside.  The most insidious strategy, though, is polishing that turd ’til it shines real good.  Sure sure, Subway, I’ll eat at one of your “restaurants” when I’m in a pinch.  But I will never be lazy enough to call Pizza Hut and ask them to deliver a trough full of leftover dough that’s been cut into spirals and slathered with peppery ketchup.  I will never ask by name for a food-like product whose main descriptor (“Tuscani”), like its “recipe”, has little basis in reality.  Most importantly, I will not swerve out of the way if any of these discerning diners steps in front of my car.