in todays battle, the victor is man

So, competitive eating is a big thing, eh? I mean, the nathan’s challenge is one of the best things to cringe through your hands at that’s on tv all summer. Kobayashi is one of the more fascinating humans on the earth and that Joey Chestnut dude, while excruciatingly revolting, has brought the big championship belt to America, finally, where it undoubtedly belongs. Here’s why: we’re huge and disgusting and everything we consume here is kind of done in such a way that it means that someone else has to go without and there’s no more perfect a metaphor for our grotesque obsession with making sure that we can throw something away so no one else can get it than a bunch of assholes pigging out for glory.

Take shoes or jeans for example. The only way that we can afford to have nice, inexpensive shoes or jeans is if somewhere out there, there are people working long hours for no money producing jeans and shoes, who could not, themselves, ever afford said shoes or jeans. If that system wasn’t in place, and people were working regular hours for decent living wages, jeans would be extremely expensive and that would be a bummer. The upshot of this whole thing is that we consume with a blind eye towards the undeniable and horrible truth sewn into our clothes and pretty much everything we own (on a side note, this whole thing comes home to roost pretty quick when you look at the way that certain unions in the US have hamstrung their employers with ever increasing demands which have forced lots of factories overseas, where pesky unions and rules about how old you have to be or how flammable something must not be aren’t running the show. But do you know WHY this is? Sure, it’s about money, but the real, honest to god truth of the matter is that we as consumers aren’t willing to pay what it costs to produce things in the western world. No one is buying the same shitty converse sneakers for two hundred bucks, when it costs nothing to just pretend that the ones you have weren’t stitched together by a starving child) and there’s NEVER been a metaphor for the gluttony and dirty diapers of the west that’s as apt as a bunch of overweight pigs eating twenty pounds of chicken wings in under five minutes.

Man Vs Food, for those of you who don’t know, is a show about a gluttonous lard ass who gleefully prances around the united states stuffing his bloated gullet with monstrosity after monstrosity, all under the guise of just loving the food industry and its many quirks. The truth, however, is vastly more porny than that. Adam Richman insists that he hasn’t gained any weight since he started this soul-harvesting bacchanal, (a claim that creepily mirrors wayward porn stars insisting that they don’t have daddy issues/coke habits) but his chins tell a different story.

Obesity is epidemic around here, and strangely, in other parts of the world, hunger is a big problem. This guy is traveling around and glorifying an extremely unhealthy lifestyle with all the compassion of Marie Antoinette or some fat billionaire using a bunch of starving kids from Sudan as human plates for his sushi parties. He’s becoming ugly and physically gross, he’s making money by eating food he neither wants nor needs by the shovelful, celebrating his victories over food like a prizefighter, all while making everyone kind of simultaneously hungry and grossed out in the process. It’s one of the most uniquely gross shows ever put on television and I mean that in several ways. Here’s the other thing about it though, it’s insanely fun to watch.

Adam is a charismatic guy and the show is carefully constructed so that each episode sets up a conflict, a challenge and a resolution. It’s very satisfying television. The part they leave off the show however, is the part where he’s taking brutal dumps after eating ten meatloaves, or where because we decide to make a pizza using ten pounds of cheese there’s something in the neighborhood of twenty people out there on some side of the world that aren’t gonna get any cheese at all, and most tragically, the fact that there are animals that literally die and are turned into food, just to be left sitting on the scale and thrown away after the challenge runs its course.

I mean, I’m not trying to preach the evils of eating meat (though, honestly, it’s pretty cut and dry. There’s nothing so undeniably evil as killing something and eating its flesh. That’s why Hannibal Lecter scared us so much. That’s why [most of the time] the meat we enjoy is processed to not resemble the animals that it used to be, particularly if its some sort of animal we can feel empathy towards [like a cow or sheep, who seem a lot cooler than a chicken or a lobster {a gigantic bug that is disgusting no matter what and also excellently discussed as a food source in the late, great David Foster Wallace’s brilliant article Consider the Lobster which everyone should read, if for no other reason than because it’s hilarious}]) but there’s something seriously fucked up about killing something and processing its flesh into, lets say corned beef, and then just setting that corned beef in a gigantic pile and eventually throwing it away. It’s really, really, really, really fucked up for at least 2 reasons:

1. Motherfuckers out there are hungry! There are children on this earth that literally eat stones and dirt to stop hunger pains. To just throw shit away is not just wasteful, it’s cruel to the point of scariness.
2. That was a living thing at one point, man! It’s one thing to kill an animal and eat it, but what the fuck kind of life is it when you are born for the express purpose of becoming food someday, you live your entire life working towards the burger you will someday become and then once you’ve taken the plunge and turned yourself into food (kind of euphemistic, but you get the idea, once you become food) they just throw you away?!?!?!? Seriously? You sent my body through a machine that cut out the sinew and separated my muscles from my bones, drained my blood and put the meat from my ass and legs into a brine, cooked it over fire, and then rather than even enjoy it, you THREW IT AWAY!?!?!?!?!?!!??!

That’s just fucked up, man. It really is. That’s EVEN more fucked up than just eating it even though you’re full and it will definitely make you sick. That’s like killing a hooker and not even making her into a dead skin mask or cutting out her vagina and putting it in your scrapbook of hooker vaginas. It’s like tossing puppies into a river for fun. It’s so demented and there’s an industry that not only thrives on that, but simultaneously celebrates bad health, wasting food, laughs heartily at the inequality of life on this planet AND gleefully encourages gluttony and grotesquite.

I dunno, man. Watched a lot of that shit this weekend and I’m feeling kind of gross today, so that’s what’s on my mind. I realize that pointing out the repulsive evils of competitive eating is about as edgy and visionary as singing a punk song about how cops suck or making a porn that celebrates the male orgasm like it’s a fountain of gold, so you can spare me the bullshit. Kay. Good deal. Have a good Monday. I feel like the world is kind of out to get me today, so be cool.

xoxoxoxo