It's tough going out there in fast food land. Competition is fierce and marketing budgets are immense. In an attempt to get a leg up, fast food outlets are forced to continually update their menus with new — or apparently new — items.

More often than not, the hot new menu items are simply slight variations on a well-worn theme, like a regular chicken sandwich with some sort of Chipotle-Blaster honey mustard or a little extra black pepper to make it "spicy." Other times, they take a regular food item and do something wild and crazy like change the shape, as Burger King has done with their French Toast Sticks, and Arby's with their evidently much wilder French Toastix. Burger King recently set the gold standard for this technique with the introduction of Chicken Fries, which are basically McNuggets shaped to look like french fries, the logic being that they're somehow more "portable."

Other promotions take familiar offerings and super-duper-size them, as Hardees has done with their new gigantic hamburgers and Burger King with their Enormous Omelet Sandwich. Talk about truth in advertising: the latter fare, which consists of bacon, sausage, cheese and eggs on a bun, weighs in at 730 calories, 47 grams of fat (including 87% of the daily allotment of saturated fat) nearly 2,000 mg of sodium and 138% of the RDA for cholesterol. God, it would take Nicole Richie a week to eat this thing.

Things get truly ridiculous, however, when fast food marketers try to think outside the styrofoam box and create entirely new menu items. The McRib sandwich from McDonald's — which I must confess a weakness for — is a classic example. The McGriddle, which takes a slab of sausage and slaps it between two syrup-infused griddlecakes, is another. But originality has its limits, as do the bounds of good taste. Take for example, Arby's new Roast Beef Gyro, or the Crunchwrap Supreme from Taco Bell. Seriously, take them. I'm not going near them.