NOTES FROM THE HINTERLAND
PRODIGIOUS EATING
By Laurie Meunier Graves
Have a banana, have a whole bunch.
It doesn't matter what you had for lunch.
Just eat it! Eat it!
Eat it! Eat it!
Eat it! Eat it!
If it’s too cold, reheat it.
From “Eat It” by “Weird Al” Yankovic
Recently in the news, there has been a rash of bad news for people who like
to eat and whose waistlines are a reflection of this. According to the
New York Times, “a government report [declared] fat second only to
tobacco as a harbinger of preventable morbidity.” The ramifications of this
are not pretty to consider. Who, in their wildest dreams, would ever have
imagined that, say, a raspberry cream turnover would be in the same category
as a cigarette? That to eat a hot fudge sundae is to flirt with death?
The bad news doesn’t stop with health. Indeed, it has even spilled over to
the arts, most ominously to opera, where the singers have long been known
for having bodies as ample as their voices. Again, according to the New
York Times, the Royal Opera at Covent Garden in London decided “to drop
the soprano Deborah Voigt from a new production of Strauss’s “Ariadne auf
Naxos” in June because she was deemed too heavy for a slinky black dress
that is central to the director’s concept of the role.” If Deborah Voigt is
too heavy for opera, then that does not bode well for those of us who are
more than pleasingly plump. What will the next pronouncement be? That John
Goodman is too heavy to play the part of Sir John Falstaff?
However, perhaps the worst news of all has come from McDonald’s, one of the
last bastions of fat and high calories. In a move that has shocking
implications, McDonald’s has decided to do away with its “supersize” French
fries and soft drinks. Gosh darn it, people don’t go to McDonald’s because
the food is healthy and nutritious. Not at all. They go because they like
grease and plenty of it. To the glutton, there is an undeniable thrill of
getting a carton of hot fries so big that it could feed a family of four.
Except it’s not for a family of four. It’s for one person. For you, in fact.
Maybe you will share and maybe you won’t. But there they are in their greasy
glory, putting to rest the stingy notion that less is more.
Yes, yes, I know. To be obese is not healthy—we know we should eat lightly
if we want to live a long life—and a slim, agile figure is more appealing
than a body padded with rolls of fat. Yet, when it comes to food, there is
something fascinating about the idea of throwing aside caution and good
sense. Of embracing excess and abundance and, in a strange kind of way,
life.
In the book Gluttony, Francine Prose describes Diamond Jim Brady, a
man of immense girth, who, when he sat down to eat, would not stop eating
until his stomach hit the edge of the table. The aforementioned Falstaff is
a character whose outsized appetites are reflected in his mountainous
physique. While Falstaff is certainly a flawed man whose behavior, at times,
is nothing short of reprehensible, he has a lust for life that never fails
to enthrall theatergoers. Then there was Winston Churchill, a sort of real
life Falstaff, a man known as much for his zest and appetite as he was for
his eloquence. To this list we can add A. J. Liebling, Orson Welles, and, my
personal favorite, Fats Goldberg.
It doesn’t surprise me that no famous women eaters, real or fictional,
immediately come to mind. Perhaps it’s a failure of memory on my part, but I
fear the real reason is that women are too obsessed with body image to just
let loose and enjoy being a glutton. And, of course, society only reinforces
this timidity.
For first-hand examples of prodigious eating, I need go no further than my
own family. To us, the weekly trip to the grocery store was almost as
special as a holy day of obligation. We treated it as an outing, an
excursion to the land of plenty, where rows and rows of food beckoned to us.
What would we choose? Oreos, cream horns, turnovers, or nuts? Pretzels, Twizlers, hot dogs, or potato chips? Why choose? Why not get them all? We
might live in a drafty old house with crooked floors, but when it came to
food, there were no budgets, no lists. If we liked something, into the cart
it went.
And then, when we got home, there was what I can only call a feeding frenzy.
I’ve described this before, but it was such an amazing spectacle that it’s
worth repeating. As soon as the bags were on the counter, we ripped into our
favorite snacks before they even made it into the cupboard. Bags would be
torn, wrappers would fly. Cold cuts, pickles, potato chips, and Twizlers.
Nothing escaped our ravenous appetites. To us, it was the perfect ending to
our day trip, and the first time my husband witnessed the event, he could
only gape in astonishment.
It seems unfair to single out any family member—my father, mother, and I
were all big eaters—but special honors must go to my brother Steve, whose
appetite is so large that it has become almost legendary in the Waterville
area. In my imagination, I can picture the staff of Chinese restaurants
cringing when they see my brother come in. They glance nervously at the
buffet to be sure there is enough food. Then there is my brother, who with
narrow eyes, scans the buffet, cracks his knuckles, and begins. Here
imagination ends, and facts begin. Steve tells me that he would plow through
so many chicken wings that his table looked like a chicken burial ground.
The staff must have worked feverishly to keep up with him, and when at last,
they were exhausted, they resorted to extreme measures. “They would try to
drive me out by withholding water,” Steve has explained. But it was a
last-ditch effort conceived in desperation, and like most such measures, it
didn’t work. On and on my brother would eat, undeterred by thirst, making
his way through hot and sour soup, chicken fingers, and beef with peapods. I
expect he was the first to come and the last to leave.
Unlike Falstaff or Winston Churchill, my brother has never been fat.
Apparently, he burns more than he gains. How he does this is a mystery to
me, and, I must add, it seems grossly unfair. In addition, he has married a
woman who can more than keep up with his astonishing appetite for food. As
my stepfather has put it, she has the appetite of a ditch digger. Indeed she
does, but in another example of life’s gross unfairness, she is as slim and
pretty as she was when my brother married her fifteen years ago.
I smile as I write about these incidences of prodigious eating, but would
anyone smile relating tales of dieting and deprivation? Perhaps some would,
but being a true glutton, I can scarcely imagine such a thing, and I have an
excellent imagination. At its essence, abundance and eating represent zest
and a joie de vivre that no amount of healthy-food lecturing can diminish.
Supersize fries might soon be a thing of the past, but the lust for eating
can never be killed.
