Saturday, July 23, 2011

Our Food Sick Society - Part II

   So here I sit after last night's Final Seafood Platter, slightly hung over, and feeling very sluggish. We went to Dempsey's last night and indulged in a fry fest of fairly epic proportions...fried shrimp, fried fish, fried onion rings, and that uniquely Southern delight, fried dill pickles! As always at Dempsey's, it was awesome! And, as usual at all restaurants these days, the portions were gigantic! Actually, the portions at Dempsey's are even more outrageous than usual, but almost all restaurants serve up huge platters of food, unless they are in the "Snooty Fine Dining" category. At a Snooty Fine Dining Place, you would get a huge platter with a smear of sauce, 3 shrimp, a cherry tomato sliced in half, and a sprig of grass from the parking lot, all huddled in the middle of a plate the size of a hub cap from a Cadillac. We do not tend to frequent such dining establishments. Like most Americans, and almost all Southerners, we want some food on our plate, dammit!  It may go back to the whole caveman thing, where we grabbed as much as we could because we needed to, or maybe we good Southern guys and gals are just gluttons - either way, portions in restaurants are getting ridiculous. 

   I was surfing through the Vast Wasteland the other day (that's Cable TV, of course), and I reached the Food Channel, which is actually not too terrible, although I miss the original Iron Chef show, filmed in Japan and subtitled...THAT show was fucking hilarious! These days, they have a lot of stupid contest shows, where cooks are given some strange ingredients and told to cook a meal with those ingredients, then the meal gets judged by people of questionable sexual orientation, the loser cries, and the winner gets taken backstage and gets molested by the stage crew, or maybe they just give them some cash and off they go. I don't know and I don't care, those shows suck ass. The other kind of show they have is the drive-around, where someone drives around, and eats here and there, and talks about what they eat. The king of the Drive Around is a guy named Guy. Guy is a total douchbag, but he is very photogenic in a Complete Moron sort of way. He wears his sunglasses on the back of his neck, his hair looks like a dead possum is glued to his head, and he spouts out sound bites like, "We're riding the Gravy Train to Flavor Town, Baby!" and "That was OFF the HOOK, Bro!" and then mugs for the camera. He's a total dumbfuck, and his show is enormously popular. Another thing that is enormous is the portions at the dumps he goes to. Nothing is small, all of the dishes are gigantic. Let's say someone is making a corned beef on rye sandwich. The cook shows us how he cures the slab of beef, where it looks like something in Jeffery Dahmer's basement, then he slices up about 2 pounds of meat, slaps it on slices of bread about 3 inches thick, slathers it with a quart of mustard and special sauce, and serves this huge sandwich on a serving platter with a mound of fries and a side of coleslaw...all that food is intended for ONE PERSON...it's enough for 4, but it is served up as a single meal, and all the dishes on the show are equally huge. It's like this show is holding up a standard for all the eateries out there - "You must serve gigantic portions, or you suck and you don't deserve to be on this show!" and other restaurants are taking the hint. It seems like any place you go, if they serve normal size meals instead of fucking huge dishes, they will be out of business soon.

   I can't wait to go to one of these places, order up the Mondo Platter o' Food, eat three shrimp, a half a piece of fish, one bite of slaw, and then smile as I ask for a to-go box. I can just hear the conversation now; "Sir, was everything alright with your meal?" Yes, yes it was fine, thank you. "Well, it doesn't appear that you ate very much, are you sure everything was OK?" "It was fantastic, gonna tell all my friends how awesome it was, thanks." The look of confusion on their faces will be priceless! They may even be dumb enough to ask why I only ate enough for a small child, or perhaps a Scottish Terrier. I think I'll make up a bullshit story for them, just to fuck with them even more - "Well, see, a Taliban submarine shot down my hovercraft over Moscow, and the Chinese medics weren't very well equipped, so they just cut out my stomach, instead of trying to patch it back together. I can only eat 4 bites at a time, and I need to eat 17 meals a day..." The big question is, how many people will have the balls to call bullshit on such a silly story? Or will they even realize how stupid it is? The Taliban doesn't have submarines!

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