There has been lots of buzz surrounding Burger King’s Whopper Virgins (agency: Crispin Porter + Bogusky) campaign, in which documentary filmmaker (and 70’s skateboard phenom) Stacey Peralta travels with a Burger King funded production crew to remote parts of the world and conducts Big Mac/Whopper taste tests for people who have no concept of what a hamburger is.

I love this campaign and hate it, too. I love it because it’s sneakily slick, impressive in its ability to render real emotion from images of friendly, curious, untarnished citizens of humanity. I hate it because it then proceeds to shamelessly tarnish them with the literal processed meat of the inching soldiers of global corporate hegemony. At the end of the day, this whole thing is purely fascinating, akin to scene in the movie theatre in Outbreak where the camera zooms in on the airborne particles carrying a fatal African virus traveling from one unknown audience member to another. That’s right, I just equated Burger King to a disease; anyone want to disagree?