Mayor can yell all he wants about healthy eating, but free fat, grease and sodium on a bun wins every time

hit would slowly, but surely, demolish the ugly behemoth that is City Hall.

Plus most of the value in things like this simply isn't the free sandwich, but the social interaction of being a part of it.

I agree with you, but in the end it can't just be the sandwich. Skipping out of the office with friends, waiting a ridiculous amount of time in line, going back and having the excuse for what you did to tell you boss that writes it off as "i wish you told me too", ect...

Same reason most people go to bars and spend ridiculous amounts of money on overpriced alcohol, when cheaper options are available. It's the social aspect.

First, many competitive eaters vomit afterwards, so they aren't ingesting all of the fat and calories for more than the time it takes to win or lose the contest. The contests are also infrequent (as you say, once a year) and so even if you were to keep all of the food down, it wouldn't impact your health much in any way as long as you don't do so regularly. Even once a month wouldn't be too bad and would require you to make some compensations in the rest of your monthly diet.

Second, even in the case of this free burger give-away, the same principle applies. There's nothing wrong with having a hamburger, even an absurdly out-of-proportion one with over-the-top ingredients occasionally. The key is to take it into account when you determine what else you eat and how much you exercise. The failure of the general public (myself included) is to deal with the planning if you're going to splurge like this occasionally.

That's why I'm a bit disappointed with the headline and framing of this picture. The problem the Mayor tackled by doing things like removing the soda machines from City Hall is the regular consumption of carbonated sugar water multiple times a day, every day. It becomes an assumed normality and part of your regular pattern to just "go get a coke", which quickly adds up when you're not taking into account the impact of the high amounts of sugar and subsequent calories on top of everything else you eat or drink that day.

Every single one of the people in line could have been the fittest yoga instructors and Olympic track runners you've ever seen and it wouldn't have been hypocritical of them to eat a free super bacon burger with cheese...as long as they took into account the calories and other nutritional info when determining what else to eat today and how much exercise was needed to moderate the effect of eating the burger.

Time is money!

Which is why you're surfing the net, and commenting on blog posts.

I don't know, anon, in my experience the British are wonderfully courteous and orderly whilst standing in a queue (even if they complain that the having to do so is evidence of a shambles at the front of it).

In my experience, the Swedes, Germans and Swiss are also notably well-behaved, as are most of the French.

Now that I think of it, there seems to be an direct relationship between courteous and orderly queuing and lattitude in Europe (my experiences in Italy, Spain, and parts of southern France were barely controlled chaos).