Marcel Winatschek

The Burger Is a Prop

You’ve seen the photos. A model—impossibly thin, subsisting apparently on the fumes of ambition—grins next to a two-pound cheeseburger dripping with cheese, looking genuinely delighted, as if this is just what she eats on a Tuesday. The burger is immaculate. The model is immaculate. Nobody in the history of the cheeseburger has ever looked that happy while eating one that size, because eating a burger that big is serious work involving napkins and some personal shame and definitely not that expression.

The Instagram account YouDidNotEatThat exists solely to document this particular theater, and it is one of the internet’s more useful services. It archives these performances—the cupcake she’s perpetually about to eat, the pizza slice held aloft like a torch of liberation—and invites submissions from anyone with functioning eyes and a sense of humor. It’s petty. It is also completely correct. The burger was always a prop.