Articles of Mastication

Man V. Food Television

I watched Man V. Food for the first time the other night. The title itself immediately brings conflict to mind, as if to say, “There is nothing laudable about a harmonious relationship with one’s sustenance. Prudence is for the weak and unambitious. You must seek a mountain of  food and conquer it with the mouth as if you were climbing Olympus itself and daring Zeus to strike you down with lightning bolts of myocardial infarction. You must be upon the buffet as the Mongols crossed the steppe, leaving naught but heaps of bones.”

Eating is advisable, and can even be enjoyable. Maybe it’s that I’ve been a culinary professional for my entire working life, but food as fetish spanks my rosy red bottom the wrong way, and a little too hard. I know that Adam Richman is an actor, employed by a television network to entertain, and I’ve read that he offsets the effects of the ridiculous food challenges his whip-crackers put upon him with a regimen of exercise and… water. But when he’s getting all amped up about the excesses of some local American greasy spoon’s “fortuitously famous fodder”, he starts sounding like a coked-up Chris Farley. And then I’m unable to pry from my head the image of said deceased comedian shoveling pound after pound of twelve different kinds of pork from a BBQ buffet into his cavernous maw, braying like an ass that got into the cider barrel about how amazing everything is, and articulating assinine alliterated assessments of the indiscernible glop mounds under assault while the gravy from six different animals sets to the oozing from every orifice on his head. And you might find his gushing praise believable if it didn’t sound like he’d just quaffed a gram of 100% pure Colombian (cocaine, not coffee), which has rendered his tastebuds impotent. He cannot taste a single nuance of what’s clinging for dear life to his poor fork, the sniffer and palate fried from the drug and acid reflux. He screams a hoarse, unintelligible ululation and falls to the floor in a quivering, gelatinous heap. Cut to commercial…

[A naked Paula Deen is smeared with viscous brown goo, bellowing, "I just love my puddin', y'awl!" from within her backyard jacuzzi running over with the chocolate variety. "And I'll be jiggered if I just can't wait fer y'awl to join me on my next episode, where we're gonna have all kinds o' puddin' out here in the hot tub! I'm even gonna show you how to make my grandmawmaw's puddin' pie, God rest her soul up in heav'n..."]

Food is terrific stuff. Sensuality and dining are fantastic. But, friends old and new, food obsession is just gross. Compulsively watching people have food-gasms on television is one molecule away from compulsively reading trashy novels for want of true intimacy. They don’t call it food porn for no reason, and excess in this regard is every bit as sexy as living through the recessions and depressions of an empire crumbling under the weight of its own corpulence and greed. If you don’t see the connection, please return to your television and darken my kitchen no more.

Tags: food, food and drink, food television, media