National McDonald’s Day
For National McDonald’s Day, I decided to mark the occasion properly.
This is my idea of a celebration cake.
Five BIG ARCH burgers, stacked, unsteady, and exactly what they are, straight from the bag. No styling, no corrections. Just excess, structure, and the kind of presentation that doesn’t need explanation.
The BIG ARCH itself is perhaps a callback. McDonald’s tried something similar in the mid-1990s with the Arch Deluxe, positioned as a more “grown-up” burger. It came with one of the largest promotional budgets ever put behind a fast food product at the time. The product, however, didn’t last.
The BIG ARCH is a large, limited-time release, built as a more substantial offering. Two quarter-pound beef patties, three slices of white cheddar, crispy and slivered onions, pickles, lettuce, and a tangy BIG ARCH sauce, all on a sesame and poppy seed bun. It leans into size, layers, and presence rather than subtlety.
Every year on this day, McDonald’s fans mark a special day known as McDonald’s Day. It commemorates the opening of Ray Kroc’s first McDonald’s franchised restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois, back in 1955.
More to see from my Food From Bag To Background series on my website at
https://www.secondfocus.com/index/G0000wQ3fbeEezF0
A Monument to Cheese Pizza
Another entry from the calendar of invented holidays: National Cheese Pizza Day. As if anyone needed a reminder to eat melted cheese on bread. Still, here it is — and so is my monument to it. Two frozen Red Baron cheese pizzas sliced and stacked into a tower of excess, photographed against a black background.
Cheese pizza is the baseline of the whole idea. From Naples in the 1800s with mozzarella and tomato on flatbread, to Lombardi’s in New York serving it to immigrants in the early 1900s, it’s the foundation on which every other topping variation was built. Frozen in the 1950s, it became the fallback dinner most of us know.
So if today calls for honoring cheese pizza, this is mine.
See more in my Commercial Food Photography gallery:
👉 https://www.secondfocus.com/index/G0000WFAqDJQOgKU
Potato Chips Deserve Better
Today is National Junk Food Day, a real thing someone decided we needed—because apparently we don’t already have enough reasons to eat chips, cookies, and neon orange snacks straight from a crinkled plastic bag.
But this year I decided to elevate things. After all, potato chips are the reigning king of American junk food—no contest. More bags are sold, crunched, and regretted than just about anything else in the snack aisle. So I gave them what they’ve never had: respect. Or at least the illusion of it.
I photographed a bowl of potato chips just as they came—no rearranging, no styling—but placed them in a deeply elegant cut glass bowl. Something you’d expect to find filled with pearls at an estate sale, not salted starch slices.
The result? A visual tension between crystal and crunch, between refined and ridiculous. High society meets high sodium. A still life that asks the eternal question: How fancy can you make a snack that leaves grease on your fingers?
Happy Junk Food Day, America.
And if you’re still hungry, you can find more food photographed just as it came in my commercial food gallery at https://www.secondfocus.com/index/G0000WFAqDJQOgKU
Twinkies, Twenty of Them
Twinkies, twenty of them for National Twinkie Day today!
April 6, 1930 — James Dewar invents the Twinkie in River Forest, Illinois. He names it after a roadside ad that read: “Twinkle Toe Shoes — the kids’ favorite”. Banana filling at first. Vanilla took over during WWII, and never left.
Since then, they’ve been everywhere: bunkers, lunchboxes, courtrooms, campaign speeches, urban legends. They were discontinued in 2012, mourned like pop stars, then brought back in 2013. This is nostalgia. And a little bit of history.
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