Burger King Foot Lettuce — Person in black work boots standing in two plastic bins of shredded lettuce on a red-tiled fast food kitchen floor

Burger King Foot Lettuce

2012copypastaclassic

Published August 12, 2026

Burger King Foot Lettuce is a 2012 food-safety scandal turned copypasta, sparked by a 4chan photo of an Ohio Burger King employee standing shoes-deep in two lettuce bins. Users cracked the image's EXIF data within minutes, got three workers fired, and the story returned as a viral copypasta after YouTuber Chills narrated it in a 2017 countdown video.

copypasta memes 4chan memes fast food memes delayed virality memes youtube culture memes

Overview

Burger King Foot Lettuce refers to a July 2012 food-safety incident in which a Burger King worker in Mayfield Heights, Ohio uploaded a 4chan photo of his shoes planted inside two open bins of restaurant lettuce, captioned 'This is the lettuce you eat at Burger King'1. Within about 20 minutes, 4chan users had pulled the image's EXIF geolocation data, pinpointed the exact restaurant, and started phoning the store and local newsrooms5. Three employees were fired within days2.

The scandal returned to the internet's front page five years later after Canadian YouTuber Chills used it as item 15 in a 2017 countdown video called 'Top 15 Mysteries Solved by 4Chan'3. His flat, monotone delivery of the opening line, 'Number 15: Burger King foot lettuce. The last thing you'd want in your Burger King burger is someone's foot fungus,' turned the intro into a widely quoted copypasta and reaction-video template on YouTube and Reddit4. The meme now points to two things at once: an actual health-code incident, and the audio clip that made the story funny again.

Origin & Background

Platform
4chan (original photo) / YouTube (viral copypasta spread)
Creator
Anonymous 4chan user
Date
2012

The original post went up on 4chan at 11:38 PM on July 16, 2012 from an anonymous user who identified himself as a Burger King employee5. The photograph showed his feet, shoes still on, standing inside two plastic lettuce containers in a back-of-house prep area, alongside the caption 'This is the lettuce you eat at Burger King'2. The uploader had not stripped the file's EXIF metadata, so the GPS coordinates baked into the JPEG gave away the store almost immediately1.

According to the timeline recorded by early responders, the branch address was posted back to the thread by 11:50 PM, roughly twelve minutes after the initial upload5. A tip to a local news station followed within minutes, and by 11:58 PM the photo was already sitting inside Burger King's own 'Tell us about us' online feedback form5.

How It Spread

Cleveland Scene broke the story on July 17, 2012, the morning after the post1. When a reporter reached the store, the breakfast-shift manager reportedly answered, 'Oh, I know who that is. He's getting fired'1. Today, Gawker and The Daily Dot picked it up the same day, with Burger King corporate spokesperson Bryson Thornton confirming the location was independently owned by a franchisee and that three employees had been terminated over the staging2. The Cuyahoga County Board of Health cleared the restaurant after an inspection; deputy director Dave Covell told Cleveland Scene that more than the two visible bins had been affected, but none of the lettuce reached a customer1.

The copypasta phase started on November 11, 2017, when the Top15s YouTube channel uploaded 'Top 15 Mysteries Solved by 4Chan,' narrated by Canadian YouTuber Chills. The video passed 1.4 million views4. On November 19, YouTuber ling clipped just the opening 'Number 15: Burger King foot lettuce' introduction, and on January 24, 2018, YouTuber madison did the same, each isolation gaining tens of thousands of views on its own4. The full monologue was reposted to Reddit's r/copypasta on January 28, 20184.

Remixes kept the format alive through spring 2018. YouTuber grandayy uploaded a parody on March 3 that also passed 1.4 million views, and Saltydkan posted a straight re-read of the same script on March 5 that cleared 119,000 views4. The clip's odd cadence made it a favorite for dub-over jokes, and food writers still point to the incident as a turning point in how fast-food brands treat social media3. In December 2024, YouTuber Epic Alex Time posted 'Burger King Foot Lettuce Guy (Full Story),' claiming to be the person in the photo; the video passed 24,000 views over the following seven months4. Know Your Meme interviewed Alex in February 2025, during which he said he regretted the stunt and confirmed it did cost him his Burger King job4. On July 10, 2025, friends announced that Alex had died, and his brother started a GoFundMe for funeral costs the next day4.

How to Use This Meme

The Burger King Foot Lettuce copypasta is typically deployed by quoting the Chills opening line, 'Number 15: Burger King foot lettuce,' either as a text drop or as an audio clip stitched over unrelated video4. Common conventions include using the full first paragraph as the intro to a fake countdown, dubbing the audio over other 4chan-style scandals for parody effect, or bookending short reaction videos with just the 'Number 15' beat4. The image of the shoes-in-lettuce photo itself often appears without any caption at all, since the visual carries the reference on its own3.

Frequently Asked Questions