The last thing you'd want on your is, well, whatever's on the bottom of someone's shoes. But that's what some customers could have gotten from an Ohio Burger King if it wasn't for the online sleuths who traced an image of two shoes planted in buckets of lettuce back to the restaurant. The picture, now more than a decade old, endures online as an infamous meme and a reminder that few things online are truly anonymous.
The "Burger King foot lettuce" photo was first posted to the imageboard 4chan in July 2012 alongside the caption, "This is the lettuce you eat at Burger King." Within minutes, users had extracted the geo-location info from the image file — something the uploader had neglected to remove or simply didn't care to — and found that it really did originate from a BK in Mayfield Heights. Soon enough, the town's Facebook page was flooded with reposts of the image, and local news outlets began to investigate.
By the time reporters got a hold of the restaurant's management, they discovered that three employees had been fired over the staging of the foot lettuce photo. Burger King corporate responded to press requests with some deflection, saying that the BK in question is independently owned and operated by a franchisee (and thus responsible for the actions of its own staff). But the uproar over the shocking image turned the whole story into one of the internet's longest running jokes, forcing .
Burger King foot lettuce took off on YouTube The meme's infamy hit its zen.