First Place
Eight Big Macs. Two SB-800 speedlights and on-camera flash (Nikon CLS kicks arse) Nikon D80 I think at 1/125 f/5.6. Fast enough to shoot hand-held before it would tip over. The Macs are skewered with two wooden kebab skewers to a piece of plasticine (unfortunately visible). Some Photoshop curves and black-and-white mixing. -Zach Slootsky

Second Place
The Coburg Cafe’s monster burger. Regular sized burger on top for size reference; 0.5kg hamburger, ham, bacon, Swiss & American, on an 8-inch bun with all the fixins’ -Trask Blueribbon [Ed note: Remember to tell us your camera/settings!]

Third Place
This photo was taken at my son’s school cafeteria. We had lunch together. It was abysmal. Jello was good though. I snapped this photo with my Verizon HTC Touch. Basic settings. My technique was to hold back the vomit before I barfed on my phone. -Robbie Amburgey

Thanks for the entries, and look for a more classic Shooting Challenge topic next week — something more along the lines of photography for photography’s sake. (Not that I don’t love watching you poison yourselves in the name of art.)

Drop ¥100 ($1.20) and you’ll get a Tateishi Hamburger in no time, but if you want another, you’ll have to walk into the restaurant and wait. It all seems a little gimmicky, but apparently the machine serves up 20-30 burgers a day. Weird. [Japan Probe via CrunchGear]

CheapyD, who’s no stranger to eating gigantic-ass burgers (I had that burger earlier in the week too), tried his mouth on the Windows 7 burger with his buddy. I physically couldn’t watch his video while writing this post because it the gastrointestinal wound was too fresh, so I don’t know if he liked it or not — I just know that he finished the thing with his buddy.

I, on the other hand, tried to consume the thing with my wife, and the two of us couldn’t quite manage to finish it. Not so much that we weren’t hungry, we just couldn’t stand the taste of it anymore. It was hard to actually even hold, being made out of two flimsy pieces of bread soaked in the juices from seven pieces of meat. There are a few problems with the way they made this burger. One, there’s no cheese. Two, there’s barely anything else besides meat. It would have been much more appetising if they had made the tomatoes and lettuce and onions in proportion to the meat. As is, in the Shibuya, Tokyo store at least, there was one slice of lettuce, a few tomatoes and not much of anything else.

How does it taste? How do you think it tastes? It’s seven pieces of Burger King meat. There’s no way I would eat this thing normally. I did it for you. Oh, and it’s not ¥777 (around $9.60) — it’s goddamn ¥1450 (around $17.90). The only people who got the ¥777 deal were the ones who showed up at launch, or on a first-come-first-served basis. I couldn’t understand the tellers well enough to get the story straight. Point is, it’s not only ridiculously bad, it’s expensive too.

This is meat followed by meat, washed down by meat. You start with an appetiser of meat, then maybe a meat salad and some meat soup, perhaps interjected by a meat meat, then moving on to the entrée of meat, enhanced by a bottle of your best red meat. Oh waiter, what’s for dessert? Is it meat? Oh this chef is so creative.

Since I am not a snake, I couldn’t unhinge my jaw to get the entire burger into my mouth at once. The best way, we found, was to eat it like an ice cream sundae; by hacking away at its sides with a fork. We were like chefs at a Greek restaurant, chipping at a a gigantic clump of flesh a little bit at a time; except there was no falafel at the end of this, just more F-grade ground beef. As shown in the video, you’re going to be eating meat almost all the time, with a little bit of bread and tomato occasionally as frosting.

The proportions were similar to Adam’s giant cheeto, in that too much of the inside of a thing totally screws up the delicate balance set forth by its maker. If you had an Oreo that was 10cm of frosting and two normal-sized biscuits on the end, you’d quickly discover that nature, like Nabisco, knows the meaning of moderation.

To recreate this Windows 7 burger for yourself without having to travel to Japan, head to Burger King and order a Whopper. Then throw a 10-dollar bill down and ask them to make six more patties as disgustingly as possible.

I’ve been in Tokyo a week, and I can say that, for the most part, Japanese people are quite thin thanks to their normal diet. This Windows 7 burger must be Microsoft’s way to get them up to the US range in order to make us feel better about ourselves.

Oh and as you probably guessed already, the burger was the thing that made me want to vomit — the whale actually tasted pretty good. Kinda like a tough steak. And whale tongue? That was even better. Fried whale was kinda weird, but edible.

Unless Apple decides to make a Snow Leopard Big Leopard Mac promotion with McDonalds, I’ll see you all in a week when I’m back from Japan.

CheapAssGamer took the voyage to a Burger King in Akihabara to try the Windows 7 Burger. $US14 gets you the most desiccating pile of adipose flesh ever to be partially congealed by man. [CheapAssGamer Thanks Ashcraft!]

The goal? “A contemporary, edgy, futuristic” look, according to CEO John Chidsey. One of an “upscale restaurant”.

You can see the new design in the lead shot (AP Photo/Pat Sullivan). It certainly looks more industrial, like a Chipotle. But there are more aggressive design elements, like the saucer ceiling, that you don’t really see in a stock chain restaurant. (And on another note, are a couple of touchscreens randomly dispersed through the tables really enough to encourage casual, table ordering?)

Apparently 60 locations have already gone over the “20/20″ makeover. Having witnessed their touchscreen menus in action, I’ll say that while the system is somewhat intuitive, it’s quite slow. Then again, maybe Burger King believes that if their restaurants are nicer, you might actually want to stay a while. [AP via ChipChick]

Mmmm…a whole chicken in a can. God, it looks like it was just birthed out of an aluminium womb. [Link]

Somehow, the idea of canned bread dough seems palatable while cooked and canned bread seems weird. This is especially true if the can is covered in anime characters and dispensed out of a vending machine. [Tokyo Times]

Hot dogs are scary enough without stewing in their own gross juices for years on end. [Food Network Humor]

There is something unsettling about bacon being stuffed inside a can for 10 years. [Link]

I’m not a big fan of canned meat in general—and the marketing department at Heinz isn’t helping matters. [Food Network Humor]

Ahh, the infamous canburger. If you were ever curious about what this might taste like, wonder no more.

Ugh, anyone for some soggy hot wings? [Food Network Humor]

Okay, I understand that there is a stigma associated with putting wine in containers other than a corked bottle—but canning it like a soda is just weird. [Wine In a Can]

Bonus: Who doesn’t love a good Manhattan Style Fish Asshole? A joke obviously, but it sounds about as appetising as the other stuff on this list. [Gunaxin]

You see, the military has deployed ultra-bachelor food preparation technology for decades under the moniker of MREs. Once accessible to only the most manly of men in the most dangerous circumstances the world has to offer, these self-heating dinners have migrated over the counter as well, this time marketed to truckers and seniors in RVs.

Heater Meals are almost certainly the most popular consumer-grade “MRE” on the market.

So I embarked on a day of eating just self-heated foods from the company. These meals in a bag come with the same “Flameless Ration Heater” used in MREs. The element is basically a permeable paper pouch loaded with “supercorroding” magnesium-iron alloy. When water touches the pouch, stand back, because it gets hot. For the smarter among you, that equation looks like Mg+2H2 O→Mg(OH)2 +H2 +heat (and steam).

So a basic Heater Meal comes with a pouch of food, a pouch for heating the food (loaded with one of those heating elements) and a tiny bag of water to start the reaction. You put the food bag into the heating pouch, mix in the water, then seal the whole rig back into the box. Wait 10-12 minutes and you’ve got yourself a hot meal. (If all that sounded complicated, that’s only because it sort of is.)

Breakfast

Ahh, bacon and eggs. Or should I say Hydrating Water for Fried Egg Product mixed with Freeze Dried “hearty” Scrambled Eggs and bacon.

After mixing the egg powder with water (an additional step stacked onto the process described above), then cooking, the substrate slid from its pouch like in a convenient rectangular mass. The temperature was hot (60C by thermometer!) and the texture was believably eggy (other than the crisped edges and a yolk that congealed into an inedible solid). But the flavour was something closer to a hard-boiled egg than a scrambled one. Objectively, this taste should have been palatable, but something in me was repulsed, urging me not to take more than a few bites. And the included spice pack did little to remedy the situation. As for the bacon, it never really heated to a temperature that would make its chewy texture and liberal use of liquid smoke forgivable. My cup of Metropolis coffee, however (not bundled), was delicious.

Lunch

Lunch was Southwest Style Chicken with Rice and Beans, a soulless but edible jambalaya boasting an extended shelf life of five years before perishing. A very viscous mix, the sauce coated the fork and wouldn’t come off, while the chunks of chicken contained almost no moisture split between my teeth like tenderised erasers. My palate was left with a sticky, metallic resonance. But really, all this was OK, nothing quite offensive but nothing quite wonderful either. What I really wanted was salt (to counter the senior-friendly sodium levels) and a bit of hot sauce. So I enlisted the help of some Sriracha and all was well with the world as I finished a meal that would still be good in June of 2014. And its 480 calories coupled with 28 grams of protein left my hunger satiated, my morale for self-heating meals boosted.

Dinner

By now I’m an expert. I don’t consult the instructions, ripping open packs and boxes and fluids and mixing with little abandon. Green Pepper Steak with Rice will be dinner. And while it squeezes onto my plate in a manner eerliy similar to lunch, the aroma of green pepper greets my nose in a familiar way…like food should. The flavour is balanced between meatiness and the acidic pepper. And while the steak has that eraser-texture of lunch’s chicken along with a floral aftertaste I could do without, the crunch of a sporadic water chestnuts brighten the solemnity of monotony. The dish could still use salt, but at 350 calories a plate, the stuff is practically health food. And under that lens, it’s tough to bitch too much.

The Bill

Every meal ends with bad news, so here are the real catches of eating self-heating food. The instructions fail to mention that once the food bag has steamed to a proper temperature, you need to squeeze the piping hot mixture onto a plate. This burns when attempted bare-handed (which I did three times because I’m as stubborn as I am stupid), especially as that bag is covered with heating fluids that sting any cuts on your hands. And just what do you do with a sizzling pad of magnesium-iron alloy when it’s no longer cooking your food? You can’t just turn off a chemical reaction, so you’re left with what’s essentially a Maxi Pad of heat and a small amount of noxious grey water.

So it ends up that Heater Meals are tougher to prepare than microwaved ones, meaning that they can’t possibly be the future for lazy, hairy, helpless males. But I will say, you could do worse than stick a few boxes of their meat/rice mixtures into your bomb shelter. Because while a Heater Meal can’t beat takeout, a hot meal will taste damn good amidst a nuclear fallout, trust me. [Heater Meals]