Impossible task

Ahhh, go BOGO yourself

Ilike hamburgers, and that’s why I eat them. I’m not one of those people who eats beef because it is a way to keep the bovine population under control. And I’m pretty happy to eat a hamburger regardless of whether it is comprised of beef or tofu or tree bark, as long as it tastes like a hamburger.

I know some people who firmly believe, on principle, that cows ought to be killed and ground up and cooked so that hamburgers can exist. I’ve always just considered it an unfortunate necessity.

So when I heard that Burger King was adding a plant-based hamburger to its menu and that it tastes like a regular old hamburger, I was all in. But sadly, even though it’s been available for several months now, I still haven’t tried one.

I can’t bring myself to order an Impossible Whopper because I simply don’t believe it is possible to do so. I stick with the Possible Whopper.

I’d have been the first person standing before the counter if the King of Burgers had decided to call the new offering the “Highly Unlikely” or “Incredibly Difficult” or even the “Improbable Whopper.” But by calling it the “Impossible Whopper,” Burger King is claiming something exists while simultaneously asserting that it cannot. And while I am sometimes in the perfect frame of mind to ponder such a paradox, it never happens when I am ordering lunch at a fast-food restaurant.

You, reader, may accuse me of being pedantic, but what retailers call things actually does matter. Consider the now ubiquitous BOGO sale. The first time I saw one, I was in the car with my dad. We drove past a greenhouse that was having a “BOGO” sale, and I asked him if “bogo” was a shortened version of “begonia.”

“No,” he said. “It means ‘buy one, get one.’”

“But isn’t that how retail has always worked?” I asked. “You pay for one and then you get one.”

“Well, with a BOGO sale, you buy one and then you get it and then you get another one along with it,” Dad explained.

“But then it should be a BOGAO sale—buy one, get another one. Or a BOGT sale—buy one, get two.

“BOGT doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue,” he pointed out.

“OK,” I said, “how about a BOGOF sale—buy one, get one free?”

“That sounds life ‘bug off,’” he said, and I could tell from his tone that that’s what he was ready for me to do.

Which brings us, obviously, to chicken feet. I know a woman from Albania who is also a nutritionist and who swears that broth made from chicken feet has extraordinary health benefits—makes your joints supple and extends youth and whatnot.

I’m not always sure whether what she tells me is based on the science of nutrition or on Albanian folk practices, but she seems fairly supple and youthful, and I’ll try anything once. So I trundled over to Walmart to buy a package.

I’ve never been struck by the beauty of chicken feet, even when they are still attached to the chicken. Placed on a Styrofoam tray and wrapped in cellophane, their charms do not multiply. An apt simile eludes me—they look like nothing so much as dismembered chicken feet—white, scaly, with four claws of varying length and a bit of webbing in between.

Yet what put me off was not the sight of the feet themselves, but that they had been labeled “chicken paws.”

Chickens do not have paws. I can attest to having seen paws on rabbits and kittens, but paws have no place on a chicken or removed from it. It was a deal breaker—I just can’t handle the idea of “paw broth.”

There’s an old Albanian saying— roughly translated it is “Feet I can eat, but paws give me pause,” and this is certainly true of me. We all have to draw the line somewhere, even if we’re not Albanian.

As I left the store in disgrace, I pondered my dilemma. Am I alone? And how long can I expect to hold the line? Impossible Foods now offers Impossible Pork in addition to the Impossible Burger. Surely it’s only a matter of time before it comes out with Impossible Chicken Paws. When that day comes, I may no longer have the courage of my convictions.

Especially if there’s a buy-one-get-one sale.