The color no food should be, ever. Photo: McDonald’s China

Gray is normally a color McDonald’s China reserves for its chicken meat, but in these hard times the struggling chain — though still China’s top burger purveyor — is going to try making more things gray. Pictured is the limited-time Modern Chinese Burger.

Hopefully the taste is a winner, because unlike its myriad jet-black forebears, this sandwich truly has no aesthetic value: a vaguely sinewy-looking pork patty, bacon, bleached-out iceberg lettuce, a yellow-brownish splat of dressing, and a bun stained gray with black sesame (“Modern Chinese,” maybe, in the sense that it celebrates China as the world’s leading polluter?). Whatever the case, it’s surely “the last colour you want your food to be?” TimeOut Beijing’s food editor writes. The sandwich is sticking around through November 3.

Besides using the one color typically associated with boredom, the bun also looks alarmingly like two slabs of stone, as basically anybody with eyes is pointing out:

[@Burger_Lad]