The Gastronomical Inferno: Part Four

Just what is the appeal of consuming slop until one is moribund and incapacitated? It seems a uniquely American experience. I’m reminded of an out-of-print book by Laurence Shames, The Hunger for More, where 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 disguised as the pioneer’s conquest. This is precisely the theme that restaurants and other industries use to appeal to our most base instincts. A mile away from the buffet is another 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 Houston 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.

An even more anti-social, regressive form of eating is the drive-thru eatery that accommodates the multi-tasking SUV driver. My friend recently witnessed a most hideous sight. He was waiting at Carl’s Jr. in the drive-thru lane behind a heavy-set, middle-aged woman in her Mercedes SUV. Looking like one of Odin’s Shield-Maidens with too much mascara, she was multi-tasking beyond her feeble brain's capacity. She was on her cell phone, she had the sun visor down, she had the visor mirror open with the visor light on, she was putting on both lipstick and eye makeup, and she was trying to inch up to the drive-thru window all at once.  She nearly hit the car in front of her twice.  She nearly backed into my friend’s car behind her after she overshot the window.  She didn't get off her cell phone to give her money or receive her food.  She didn’t acknowledge the Carl’s Jr. employee once. As she drove off, she still had the visor-mirror-light effect going, she was still on the phone, and she was also trying to eat French fries out of the top of the bag, stuffing the fries into her fat mouth when she nearly hit a pedestrian.  Not surprisingly,  she never stopped to check on the person she had almost maimed. She was apparently too oblivious, or worse, too imperious to stop and apologize.

With these bellicose SUV drivers terrorizing people in the drive-thru lane, the rest of us need to fight back and assert our own troglodyte image. We need to have our own oversized truck or SUV so we can protect ourselves from the self-centered, multi-tasking Viking lady. We can even outdo her. Thanks to Bull Balls Truck Nuts (“Purveyors of Fine Quality Truck Balls!”), we can attach huge, swinging, synthetic bull testicles to our SUV’s rear hitch. Oversized bull gonads, the scrotal sacs creased and wrinkled for verisimilitude, will add to our brassy flair and help establish our alpha status as we try to get to the head of the drive-thru line. Like the animal kingdom, we must, during the lunch hour, ward off our competition and savor the spoils. No one said anything about sharing when it comes to Manifest Destiny.

Comments

[Ed S.]

You've got to blame some of this on our biology and hard-wiring. Natural selection favored the proto homo sapien-sapiens who built up the thickest layers of fat and blubber, the better to survive frequent food shortages and cold weather. Would there be any Samoans/Hawiians today if this were not so? How else could they row their boats hundreds or thousands of miles to new islands across the whole Pacific? Only those with the biggest storehouses of body fat survived those trips. Of course, this survival trait is superfluous today. Although as recently as 100 years ago the fat man was admired as the most prosperous and successful.... J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, etc. for example.

[Jeff McMahon]

I agree. The survival instinct is good until it hits the point of diminishing returns.