Now see, as I remember it (so I very well could be wrong), the gimmick of eating only at McDonalds was just the frame by which the corporate malfeasance of McDonalds and the food industry as a whole, as well as school nutrition, were explored. Please correct me if I’m wrong, though, I just felt like the gimmick was…

How about we just start with giving avatars back?

Now let’s fix the commenting system so I can somehow give this multiple stars/hearts.

Glad to have Jesse and this feature back!

I completely get what he did wasn’t at all a scientific experiment (not even counting all the calories he was getting from alcohol in addition to the fast food), but the main point was at the time (at least in the US) it was almost impossible to order a reasonable amount of food at McDonald’s because the employees…

It’s great to see you’re still in the bars ;)

It’s great to be back in a bar band, baby.

(Sincerely, thank you! Delighted that new management has made it possible.)

I just googled it. It was six weeks after the release of SSM that McDonald’s discontinued the super size as well as introduced an emphasis on healthier menu items. McDonald’s vehemently denies that it was due to SSM..

Yup. I get to read medical studies of all stripes almost once a week for work, and nothing bugs me more than people who magically expect that same amount of rigor from a pop culture moment.

Idk about the US but Canadian McDonald’s stopped selling super size stuff after that film came out tho. Large is the biggest you can get for at least a decade now.

Tell them we didn’t know capturing a wild Orca whale and forcing it to live in a tank with other Orcas it didn’t know while requiring it to do tricks for food would make them violent until 2013.

Whaaaaaaaat! Supersize Me was SO iconic when I was in higschool nooooo Morgan Spurlock...

Agree that context and timeline is really important here. Yes, if Super Size Me came out in 2024 everyone would say “duh”. Part of the reason everyone would say duh is because Super Size Me came out in 2004. Which then paved the way for Food Inc, Jamie Oliver, and ten million Netflix documentaries on the subject that…

Olympic-level athletes can probably eat whatever they want, unless they’re in the midst of training and/or competition, and probably be fine.

Agree — I’m in my early 40s and been having trouble explaining to my younger friends 10-20 years my junior just how, well, “big” Super Size Me was when it came out and what kind of impact it had. No one was ever under the impression that fast food was healthy, but the degree to which it was unhealthy, and how systemic…

Always thought it was weird people criticized SSM as like an actual scientific experiment when it’s pretty clear it was gonzo journalism. I’m not the biggest fan or detractor, but I think it’s disingenuous to act like he was doing a controlled experiment, and it actually did have an impact on the food industry, I…

Yeah, I laughed at the twitter discourse as well because I was already 31 when it came out and I had friends over 300 pounds who ate fucking McDonalds every other day and they thought that was normal. Now they are in their 50's and paying for it as well.

I saw the twitter dunking and it was mostly being made by people who weren’t even alive in ‘04 when Super Size Me came out. Even at it’s release ‘Oh wow guy eats nothing but Mcdonald’s and gets fat stop the presses’ was a wide criticism of the films concept. But at the time it was pretty hard to know what was being…

It’s good to see you again and have you back Jesse! Miss your writing and commentary.

We all in the comments still came to the conclusion that it was a really poorly written review and are still disappointed that Paste still seems to be keeping a lot of the status quo from G/O media.