In Laurence Shames’ book The Hunger for More he explains that America’s frontier, fueled by the myth of Manifest Destiny, created an appetite for conquering vast lands. In the absence of virgin forestry, we, as Americans, still have the hunger to conquer and exploit, but now we’ve circumvented that rapacity into consumer excess and in the process, I would add, we regress into our troglodyte ancestors.
Gluttony and feral barbarism have been disguised as the pioneer’s conquest. This is precisely the theme that restaurants and other industries use to appeal to our most base instincts. Near my house is a popular restaurant aptly decorated like a Wild West saloon. Its theme is the prospector’s search for the mother lode. The restaurant specializes in oversized portions of steak, prime rib, baby back pork ribs, spicy chicken wings, cheddar cheese mashed potatoes, deep-fried onion ring “flowers,” carrot cake, cheese cake and chocolate fudge cake. The cakes are famous for their moisture, the result of several cups of mayonnaise that are used in the batter, and for their huge size. Each “slice,” if it could be called that, is over a foot tall and leans to the side as if it were about to tip over, but through a miraculous breakthrough in chemical-additive engineering, the cake remains upright and intact.
The portions are so big that the waiters have to practically use cranes to get the platters of food from the kitchen to the patrons’ tables. Big helpings of food require big tableware. The knives resemble ivory-handled scimitars, and they evoke a more primitive age when people dressed in animal skins and tore the blubber off of beached whales and woolly mammoths.
While romanticized by these Wild West restaurant theme parks, troglodyte-style eating is ultimately an anti-social act. For example, I’ve heard there is a steakhouse in Texas where each partitioned table has its own color TV. Hunched over like ravenous carnivores, customers squint at the TVs, just inches from their face, while cutting into their oversized rare steaks, blood and meat bits splattering against the television screens. Every now and then a busboy rushes to the TVs and wipes blood juices off the screens with a sponge. He works around the patrons who, transfixed by their program, will not budge from their spot. I imagine that as the busboy places his hands dangerously close to the chomping mouths, he sometimes gets a finger or two bitten off. His digits, sticking out of the patrons’ mouths like chicken bones, are probably inhaled during the feeding frenzy.
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