Food: A Love Story (39 page)

I love everything about the Waffle House experience and not just because watching someone fry an egg while they smoke a cigarette reminds me of my dad. I love how the waitress approaches the table with an attitude that says, “Okay, I’ll pretend to be your server before I go back to the kitchen area and pretend to be your chef.” I mostly go to Waffle House after midnight with comedian friends following shows, when the clientele is at its ripest. Many of the patrons are drunk, which explains why there are pictures of the food on the menu. I’m not sure how drunk someone would have to be to not remember what a waffle looks like. “Oh, yeah, it’s like a plaid pancake.” The folks in a Waffle House after midnight are a motley bunch of twenty-year-olds, Vietnam vets, and elderly couples ignoring each other. It feels a little like a family reunion for me, or maybe a white-trash convention. Waffle House is so filled with white trash, it actually makes the International House of Pancakes appear international. Everyone seems to be dressed in camo, on the verge of passing out, or muttering into a coffee cup, regretting the past twenty years of their lives. It’s like you walked into a scene out of
The Deer Hunter
. I’ve seen a gun up close five times in my life, and three of them have been in a Waffle House. There is always an air of danger after midnight in Waffle House. The Waffle House sign, with its individual block letters, is even reminiscent of a ransom note. Occasionally there will be a letter burnt out in the electric Waffle House sign, so the sign will read affle house. You never hear of anything good happening at a Waffle House after midnight. “Another disease was cured at Waffle House last night.” Even the hash brown section of the Waffle House menu reads like a serial
killer to-do list: “Smothered, covered, diced, and scattered.” Despite all these unbecoming attributes, Waffle House is where so many nocturnal folks, including myself, seem to go for a late-night meal. The Waffle House slogan should really be “It’s 2:00 a.m. There’s still time to make one more bad decision.”

THE CELEBRATION OF FOOD

Everyone seems to gain weight during the holidays. Unfortunately, the way I eat, I often find myself gaining weight
for
the holidays. The positive spin on my approach is that it makes the holiday weight gain seem less dramatic. As we all know, holidays are special days to commemorate historical and cultural events or famous dead people. For some reason we typically celebrate these events or honor these dead famous people by overeating on holidays. To clarify, I am talking about holidays in the American sense of the word, because, for some reason, people in the British Commonwealth call any vacation a “holiday,” which is weird and somewhat annoying, but it actually applies here too, because on a holiday (a day, not a vacation) we eat like we are on vacation (a holiday for you English-speaking foreigners). This is what you call a cross-cultural reference. I don’t know why a holiday or a vacation naturally leads to overeating. Maybe we feel like we’ve earned it. Well, I feel like I have earned it. Don’t judge me. You’re the one reading a book about food.

In a way, holidays chronicle my unhealthy living throughout a given year.

First Quarter

I start off the year with the best intentions. It’s a new year filled with hope and possibility. I resolve to lose weight, live healthier, and overall be more like Oprah. In almost reactionary behavior to December, I stumble through January somberly observing Martin Luther King Jr. Day and contemplating who is actually attending those white sales on Presidents’ Day. It seems to be going along nicely until the first Sunday in February. The first attack on my impressive few weeks of somewhat healthy living is Super Bowl Sunday. While not an official holiday, the Super Bowl provides the strongest competition to Thanksgiving on the food-overconsumption front. Unlike Thanksgiving, there is no facade of gratitude or family time … it’s all about football and food. Thanksgiving may go food, then football, but Super Bowl Sunday is simply eat food, watch football while you eat food, and then eat more food. The food served on Super Bowl Sunday is all handheld and makes the Thanksgiving meal look like a health shake. It’s like a college fraternity catered a funeral. Buffalo wings, pigs in a blanket, chips and guacamole are usually the healthiest offerings, and this is right and good because, after all, it is called the “super bowl,” not the “diet plate.”

Barely guilt ridden after my Super Bowl binge, I slog through early February with its horrible weather and no football and brace for Valentine’s Day. Around Valentine’s Day is when I really lose my way. The fatigue of winter has set in, and even though by some miracle I am in a relationship, the awkward romantic pressure of Valentine’s Day seems to prompt unjustifiable chocolate consumption. Valentine’s Day seems to be a day shaped to create failed expectations. The whole idea of a day constructed around romance seems counterintuitive. It’s like a surprise birthday party that you know about and aren’t
in the mood for. You can stop a surprise birthday party, but you can’t stop Valentine’s Day. Everything seems a little forced on Valentine’s Day. This is even evident in the amount of candy consumed. One of the Valentine’s Day traditions is giving each other those big red heart-shaped boxes filled with the gamble chocolates. I’ve never eaten any chocolate out of those big red hearts with any confidence. I always think,
This could either be really good or totally nasty
,
but I’m just pig enough to find out.
I usually get the piece filled with the pink toothpaste. Then naturally I have to eat another nine to get rid of that flavor. There seems to be no logic in why certain chocolates were included in the heart-shaped box. One time I’m pretty sure I bit into a chocolate-covered acorn. Valentine’s Day also offers the tiny chalk heart-shaped antacids that are one of the few things that make unsweetened baking chocolate seem appealing. “I know I make you nauseous so here’s a Tums with ‘hug me’ written on it.”

March brings Saint Patrick’s Day, which is also known as the “Overdrinking Academy Awards.” Saint Patrick’s Day is supposed to be an ethnic celebration based on an English saint who converted Ireland to Christianity and drove the snakes out. It usually feels more like sanctioned binge drinking. They say, “Everyone is Irish on Saint Patrick’s Day,” and I’m starting to think that is most certainly not a compliment. I always imagine Saint Patrick looking down from heaven mumbling, “What are they doing? I hated beer.” Some of the overconsumption of alcohol on Saint Patrick’s Day is a function of the Irish stereotype of a love of drinking, but I think it has even more to do with how bad corned beef and cabbage tastes. I am an American of Irish heritage. You may recall earlier that I mentioned the Saint Patrick’s Day traditions of my childhood—that we would eat corned beef and cabbage for dinner. After that my mom would encourage my siblings and me to go into the yard
looking for a leprechaun. If we caught a leprechaun, we would supposedly get a pot of gold. I realize now she probably just wanted some time alone so she could eat something delicious that was not corned beef and cabbage. Even she knew she made it wrong.

It’s strange being an Irish American. Alcohol is woven into the ethnic pride. As a teenager I felt pressure to like Guinness. It’s an acquired taste, but Guinness is presented to the Irish American as being as familiar as mother’s milk. This is probably because Guinness has the same chemical composition as your Irish American mother’s milk. As a teenager I remember thinking,
I want to like this, but I don’t see it happening.
Now I sometimes enjoy a Guinness, but I’m not crazy about the wait. You could write the entire
Guinness World Records
book while you wait for a Guinness to be poured in a bar. Often, instead of ordering a Guinness, I’ll just tell the bartender, “I’d like to wait an hour for my beer.” He knows what I mean.

Second Quarter

Spring is a period of renewal. To celebrate this period of joy and rebirth, I eat candy. Easter is one of the most sacred holidays for Christians, yet the rituals always felt very strange to me. I don’t understand where most holiday traditions came from, but the egg seems to play a particularly confusing role at Easter. I always imagine how the conversation occurred.

GUY 1:
Easter is the day Jesus rose from the dead. What should we do?

GUY 2:
How about eggs?

GUY 1:
Well, what does that have to do with Jesus?

GUY 2:
All right, we’ll hide them.

GUY 1:
I don’t follow your logic.

GUY 2:
Don’t worry. There’s a bunny.

It’s not just the involvement of eggs that makes Easter traditions so bizarre. It’s also the absurdity of letting young children handle the fragile eggs. Thank God the colorful eggs are hard-boiled because, wait for it, LITTLE KIDS BREAK EGGS. Kids can’t even dye the eggs without breaking them. Every year on the Thursday before Easter, Jeannie and I dye hard-boiled eggs with our young children. Let’s just say there’s usually a lot of egg salad eaten on Good Friday. To make matters more interesting, since we live in New York City, Jeannie and I hide the remaining unbroken eggs in our apartment and then ask our children to find them. That’s right. We are voluntarily embracing the great likelihood of a rotten egg being hidden in our small, smell-friendly apartment.

Painting eggs and looking for them is amusing, but like most five-year-olds, I focus on the more unique Easter food. Chocolate bunnies, chocolate eggs, and, of course, Peeps, which are the candy corn of Easter. Nostalgia is the only thing keeping Peeps in circulation. Fact: Stale Peeps are far better than fresh Peeps, so take care to break the plastic wrapper the night before Easter to allow appropriate hardening. I’m talking the night before Easter a year before the Easter you plan to eat them.

Recently Americans started celebrating Cinco de Mayo, perhaps less out of respect for the large number of Mexican Americans here and more to provide an excuse to have a party in May. Cinco de Mayo serves as almost a sequel to Saint Patrick’s Day, but instead of just binging on alcohol, we overconsume alcohol AND food. Excitement for spring and the fact that tacos, burritos, enchiladas, and pretty much all
Mexican foods are some of the greatest things on this planet made Cinco de Mayo an inevitable American holiday. In a lot of ways, the American celebration of Cinco de Mayo feels like a marketing stunt by the makers of Corona beer and Old El Paso products. For some reason I don’t understand, Cinco de Mayo always seems to be on or around the fifth of May.

Third Quarter

During summer the weather is nice, which means people love to eat outside. To kick off these warmer months, Americans observe Memorial Day to honor the heroes who gave their lives for this country and, more important, to celebrate the first day they can break out the grill. This love of grilling and picnicking is most notable on Independence Day. The day we as a country became free to eat whatever we wanted. The Fourth of July is another fine example of how we use holidays as an excuse to overeat. “Normally I don’t eat a burger, a brat, AND a steak, but it
is
the Fourth of July, and I’m gonna need the energy if I’m going to be blowing things up. Besides, that is what the Founding Fathers would want.” August feels like a month-long rehearsal of how we will barbecue, eat, and celebrate Labor Day.

Fourth Quarter

My favorite holiday is Halloween, and not just because women use it as an excuse to dress like prostitutes. You ladies totally do.

“I’m a witch.”

If she were a hooker.

“I’m Little Miss Muffet!”

I’m sure you are.

A
cautionary note: Never shop with your children for their Halloween costumes online. You’re sitting there with your four-year-old daughter and google “Little Red Riding Hood costume,” and what comes up looks like it should be on the cover of an X-rated video. Not that I know what the cover of an X-rated video would look like.