Welcome Fuddruckers customers!

This is funny. Due to some sort of computer glitch, visitors to the website www.fuddruckers.com this morning have been transferred to www.google.com. At Google, they naturally enter the search term "Fuddruckers," where they find U.S. Food Policy's coverage of Fuddruckers as one of the first ten search results. So dozens of people looking for information about Fuddruckers restaurants have been arriving here to read about U.S. food policy and economics from a public interest perspective.

Happy to oblige. Here is a reprint of our earlier post:

Under the category "viral," the Adrants weblog reports that Fuddruckers restaurant chain is behind a fake advertisement on the internet for a "beef relief patch." The ad's premise is that consumers need something like a nicotine patch to break their beef addiction or they will become irritable on their way to the nearest Fuddruckers restaurant for their fix. Adrants finds that the satire site is posted at the address http://www.beefrelief.com/ [link no longer working] and also on the website for the Austin-based agency Fosfurus [link no longer working]. The advertisement's nutritional sensitivity seems well calibrated with the Fuddruckers menu [link no longer working], emphasizing hamburgers ranging in weight from 1/3 pound to 1 pound. Naturally, like Quizno's and Applebee's, Fuddruckers hides its nutrition information from its customers. (If you are thinking to yourself, "we all know what a 1 pound hamburger contains," then -- without looking it up -- please post in the comments section your guess for calories and saturated fat as a percentage of the daily recommendation). The bottom of the menu page says: "Specific nutritional data on Fuddruckers menu items is not currently available." Nobody wants the government to regulate what these restaurants offer, but the economic case for better nutrition information than this is compelling, and the public deserves to know what these restaurants are selling.