Burger King New Zealand has pulled an advertisement after it was slammed for being ignorant. The island nation, which is still reeling from the aftermath of the deadly shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, found the commercial to be in particularly poor taste and slammed its racial overtones on social media.
Maria Mo, a Korean-New Zealander, spoke to CNN, saying, “I couldn’t believe such blatantly ignorant ads are still happening in 2019. I could not believe that such a concept was approved for such a big, well-known company.”
“It’s as though their thought process went, ‘what’s Asian? Chopsticks!’ and just ran with it without giving a single thought to what kind of messages could be inferred by their customer base,” she added.
The ads in question show patrons at the restaurant trying to eat a “Vietnamese” burger with oversized chopsticks, without much success. Mo said that since chopsticks had been used by East Asian cultures for centuries, and require particular finesse in using correctly, it seemed “foolish and insulting” to show them as awkward, oversized utensils.
Burger King has since taken off the commercial from various media platforms, though plenty of people managed to get screenshots and clips from the same.
Fashion label Dolce & Gabbana had also been slammed for its use of chopsticks in a ‘derogatory manner’ last year, when an ad by the company showed a Chinese model trying to eat Italian spaghetti with the East Asian utenstil.
Meanwhile, Burger King was recently in the news for having collaborated with Impossible Foods to create and serve the first ‘meatless Whoppers’, a healthier plant-based alternative to their beef burger classic.
News18