Does This Taste Funny? A Half-Baked Look at Food and Foodies (19 page)

Or
you could buy a decent car for thirty-five grand and just go to a
drive-through. In fact, the only way spending that much on a grill makes sense
is if it somehow also functioned
as
a car. Now
that
would be
something to brag about.

When I first heard
about the ‘sport’ of competitive eating, I had two reactions:

1.
     
It’s
a sport?

2.
     
It’s
really a sport?

What began as a rural
novelty at county fairs involving homemade pies has somehow become a sport,
with a governing body, sanctioned events, and over
half a million dollars
in
annual prize money.

Most people point to
ESPN for the sudden validation of recreational gorging. In the mid-seventies,
the network televised the annual
Nathan’s Famous
hot dog eating contest
from Coney Island for the first time, and strangely, people watched.

Putting aside why
someone would
enter
the contest, I can’t
imagine
watching it. If
I’m watching traditional sports, at least a part of the appeal is imagining (or
remembering) me
playing
the sport.

What I’ve seen of
competitive eating has
never
made me think, “If only it could be me up
there on a makeshift stage eating really fast.”

And I don’t ever
remember stuffing my face as a youngster and thinking, “This could be my ticket
to the big time.” Don’t get me wrong—I’m no stranger to overeating…just watch
me in Vegas at a buffet. But I do that once every ten years or so. I’ve never
thought of ‘going pro.’

Really, if we’re going
to have people compete at basic bodily functions, why isn’t there a competitive
sleeping
championship? Local mattress stores could sponsor matches.

By the way, it’s not
just hot dogs that these ‘athletes’ shove down their gullets. There are
competitions for eating asparagus, baked beans, beef tongue, Buffalo wings,
burritos, cabbage, catfish, chili, cow brain (?!), and donuts. And that’s just
the first part of the alphabet! Proving that, if we put our minds to it,
Americans can over-indulge in anything.

Most events are timed
affairs, except for haggis-eating contests. In those, I imagine the first
person willing to
eat
haggis is automatically declared the world-record
holder for haggis-eating.

For the
uninitiated, in Scotland, haggis is traditionally served with mashed potatoes
and rutabagas. For centuries, this has allowed the Scots to ignore the fact
that their national food is a mix of sheep heart, sheep liver and sheep lungs.
And I’m sure the whisky helps.

The International Federation of
Competitive Eating (which, apparently, is a real thing) oversees the big money
events. They also enforce the rules about, for example, vomiting, and right
there, you lose me as a sports fan. If throwing up is actually mentioned in the
ground rules of a sport, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to watch it on a
flat-panel hi-def screen.

The competitors prefer to call
themselves ‘gurgitators,’ which may be the least pleasant word any group of
people has ever
chosen
to call itself. And they all have nicknames, so I
guess in that sense, they’re like athletes.

For example, there’s Don ‘Moses’
Lerman, who was quoted in an interview as saying
“I’ll stretch my stomach
until it causes internal bleeding.”
Who says there are no more inspiring
stories in professional sports?

The biggest name on the circuit is
Joey ‘Jaws’ Chestnut, who started competing in college, and now holds several
world ‘records.’ He used to be ranked second in the world, but like with any
sport, there was a scandal:

The former
champion was stripped of his title and ranking by Major League Eating and the
IFOCE for refusing to sign a contract which would have prevented him from competing
in non-MLE sanctioned events. I swear I didn’t make up
any
of this.

Despite the fact that competitive
eating doesn’t really make sense to me, I wanted to interview someone involved,
until I found out they all have agents, like real athletes! How exactly do you
‘represent’ someone who does this?

“Mr. Chestnut will
not be participating in next month’s Pork Rind Championship, as we are
negotiating with a very popular seafood restaurant regarding their annual
oyster contest.”

It’s just as well I couldn’t
connect with anyone in this scene; things would have gone downhill after my
first question:

“Do you realize
that you could have fed several villages for a month with the amount of food
you’ve forced into your pie hole during your ‘career’?”

I want to laugh at all of this, but
I don’t know that this is the best time in our nation’s history to
glorify
pigging out
. I don’t mean to be rude, but we, as a country, could stand to drop
a few pounds.

I
have to admit that, on some level, competitive eating is
classic
Americana. It combines the two most characteristic American traits—gluttony and
competitiveness.

I also think that it’s the kind of activity
that inspires other countries to hate us just a little bit more than they
already do.

I suppose, if I were to
make a ‘bucket list” of things I want to do before I check out, I would have to
put
‘
make bucket list’
near the top.

It’s not that I don’t
make lists—mix my OCD with a little weed, and making lists becomes a necessity
if I want to, say, accomplish anything.

And it’s not that there
aren’t dozens of things I want to experience. The problem with lists of the
bucket
variety is that I don’t want the pressure.

 If I make a grocery
list and forget to pick up milk, I can go back to the store for milk. When I
meet my Vaguely Defined And Essentially Metaphorical God, I’d rather not be
confronted with an itemized list of Things I Meant To Do.

I thought of all this
because I had a friend visiting who wanted to go to a theme restaurant, and I
realized I had somehow avoided that experience my entire life. And I intend to
keep avoiding it.

 I always imagined the
‘experience’ at a theme restaurant to be a combination of overpriced food and bad
theater, neither of which make me want to leave the house.

Here in the U.S., the
most successful ‘concept’ is probably
Medieval Times
, or as it’s also
known, “
Where Kids Who Used To Play Dungeons And Dragons Work Between
Renaissance Festivals
.’

"Sorry folks. In the interest of
historical accuracy,

the restaurant is closed due to plague

We also have Old West
themed restaurants, pirate themes, 1920′s gangster themes…all of which I
want
to mock, but on the other hand, ordering from a college kid in a cheesy wench
costume may be as close to studying history as most Americans ever get. We like
our education to come with an appetizer.

It’s tragic how far we
have fallen behind other nations in the bizarre-restaurant race. Beirut,
Lebanon has a joint called
Buns and Guns
that serves pizzas named after
landmines (imagine the excitement when they announce “Claymore at table
5″) and a sandwich called the ‘AK-47.’ Ah, the wacky Lebanese.

In Nanning, China
there’s a place where the servers wear Mao-era Red Guard uniforms–I’m guessing
they have a pretty strict ‘no substitutions’ policy there.

But no country can
out-theme Japan. First time in Tokyo and want some local flavor? Bring the
whole family to
Nyotaimori,
where you can eat sushi off a replica of a
woman’s naked body made of dough!

Or, maybe you’re in
Taipei—take your sweetheart to Modern Toilet, where, apparently, you sit on
toilets while you eat out of toilets. And don’t forget to check out the
several
 
cafes
with a French Maid / Giggling Concubine ‘theme.’

Look, my Japanese
friends. You can stop pushing the envelope, weirdness-wise. We get it. You’re
smarter than we are, and much more clever. And you kick our ass when it comes
to kitsch.

From Hello Kitty! to
bubblegum pop music, Japan wins the game of Ironic Embrace. Now stop it. We get
that having that many smart, intensely driven people on a tiny island can drive
you a little crazy, but you
must
stop
opening restaurants
based
on the crazy.

Besides, having your
servers dress as mildly pornographic archetypes isn’t exactly groundbreaking.
We’re the culture responsible for Hooters – we get it. And skimpy costumes do
not, in a technical sense, make it a
theme
.

Unless you’re saying
the ‘theme’ is “Philandering Businessmen,” in which case you should throw in
some other characters. Have the hostess play a disgruntled ‘wife,’ and hire
children to unexpectedly show up asking in broken English, “Are you my daddy?”

Which leads me to a few
of
my
ideas for theme restaurants. Admittedly, I haven’t fully fleshed
out these ideas, and granted, I don’t even have the capital to
eat
at most restaurants, let alone own one.

But if there are any
bored venture capitalists out there reading this, here are some chances to get
in on the next big thing . . .