Gluttony Is Olympian Sport on Travel Channel

When did gluttony become an Olympic sport?

The Travel Channel’s Man vs. Food Nation promotes over-eating as a Herculean and manly trait.

Complete with crowd encouragement and melodramatic music, Adam Richman travels the country eating at restaurants that offer supersize platters for gargantuan eaters.

Richman huffs, puffs, and sweats his way through seriously oversize portions that may be seasoned with the hottest chile peppers and spices.

Comparisons to athletic training are explicit and frequent. The show’s star frames his showdowns with obscenely large meals at competitive events. The recipes – burgers, pizza, and the like – are loaded with carbohydrates and calories.

This show is so popular that Man vs. Food Nation evolved from the original program, Man vs. Food.

The promotion of gluttony is disturbing – especially when no show similarly glamorizes a gourmand for eating wisely controlled portions of healthy foods.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, nearly one-third of the U.S. population is obese. The number of obese children has doubled since 1980, and fat adolescents have tripled.

The consequences of obesity are serious health problems – from diabetes to heart attack and stroke – and early death.

We often think the word obese is a politically-correct way to avoid calling someone fat. In fact, the definition of obesity is being fat to the point where a person’s health is harmed.

CDC is so concerned with the effects of our national gluttony and poor eating habits that web page after page is devoted to such topics as

• Halting the Epidemic by Making Health Easier at a Glance and
  
  
  
• Healthy Youth: Make A Difference at Your School.

U.S. health care costs are as out of control as our eating – and the link is scientifically proven. Travel Channel’s contribution to this health quarmire, Man vs. Food Nation, is unconscionable. And that's not all. Similar programming that vaunts over-eating includes World's Best Places to Pig out, for example. What's next -- a program that shows a smoker traveling the country to over-indulge the best tobacco? Travel Channel is one of several liftstyle networks conjointly owned by Scripps Networks Interactive (70 percent) and the Tribune Company (30 percent).
There’s lot of irresponsible programming on TV, of course. People rant about sexual content, depictions of unmarried parents, and violence, for example. Controversy reigns because the nation cannot agree about social values.

The jury is not, however, about the link between gluttony, obesity, disease, and death. The consequences gluttony contribute our overburdened health care system.

Scripps Interactive and the Tribune Company are irresponsible to air a show that promotes over-eating as a competitive sport.

Food Fights: When Did They Become An Expression of Love?

When did the food fight become a family bonding activity?

Yesterday, I watched not one but two film food fights, each symbolizing fun and closeness.

In Hanging Up, Meg Ryan, Diane Keaton, and Lisa Kudrow are three sisters coping with the growing dementia and death of their eccentric father, played by Walter Mattau.

The sisters’ verbal battle is predictable. They make up while preparing a big meal, and the film ends with flour spilling wantonly over them, the floor, and everywhere as they re-live fond memories and renew their love for each other.

The food fight also may symbolize erotic love. Holly Hunter, as Det. Grace Hanadarko in the TV series Saving Grace, smears catsup and mustard over love interest Kenny Johnson/Det. Ham Dewey.

He smears back, and we know how this scene fades to black.

Catsup and mustard?

What is romantic or loving about having to clean up gooey condiments or fine flour from upholstery, between floor boards, and all tiny places into which food may fall?

I shudder at the sanitation implications; here in South Florida, ants and cockroaches own this place. The tiniest atom of food is an invitation to move in and stay for a long, long time.

Moreover, I loathe housework, so anything that increases the need for this is an activity to be assiduously avoided.

What is the secret of relishing a food fight? Are we to assume that the movie characters have housekeepers to clean up after them?

I doubt I’d feel comfortable having a housekeeper know I’d engaged in such childish pranks, increasing the work for her.

A food fight may be an improvement over much Hollywood fare – action flicks with lots of explosions and phony animation.

In a food fight, it is only the emotions that are phony.

Quest for Confectionary Relic Is Unrequited

Last weekend, I called two Fort Lauderdale candy stores with unusual confections. I was searching for fairy floss, better known as cotton candy, a sweet memory of everyone’s childhood for the last 100 years.

Today, I tried the Fort Lauderdale Swap Shop, which may or may not be the biggest flea market in the world. It has been featured on a documentary about great American flea markets on the Travel Channel. One world traveler, a British gal working in the south Florida tabloids, once described it to me as "exotic as any North African souk."

The swap shop has some kiddie rides. It's hard to tell which are in a state of disassembly and which are still in use, until the ride starts, blaring Hispanic music. There used to have an indoor circus, but the aging owner had a family out with them. The Hanneford Family Circus was a unique and irreplaceable feature of this old Florida institution.

I fear the aging buildings will not be around much longer. Like the orange that were once such fun to visit in western Palm Beach country, the swap shop will be replaced by housing developments that are "all made out of tickey-tacky, and they all look the same," to quote Malvina Reynolds' Little Boxes.

One booth at the swap shop had cotton candy in plastic containers. That is so sad. Once, in desperation, I tried this pre-made, preserved stuff. Fairy filament is not meant to be trapped in a bottle. It must melt magically in the mouth.

Apparently, it is possible to make cotton candy at home. This process involves the use of a candy thermometer and enough dexterity to spin the sugar with a cut-off whisk. I tend to glue my fingers together, so that rules out homemade cotton candy making for me.

I've read that green apple cotton candy is served as dessert at the Tatu sushi restaurant in the Seminole Indians' Hard Rock Cafe and Casino south of here -- the one where Anna Nicole Smith died in her hotel room.

That one sentence sums up the jarring contradictions of contemporary culture. Cotton candy is as American as Ipods despite its apparent origin in medieval Italy. Sushi emblemizes ultra-global cuisine imported from that techie empire, Japan. The restaurant name, Tatu, sounds like the name of a comic French film star. Seminole Indians invoke the uniquely U.S. Wild West of days past; Hard Rock Cafes celebrate the semiotics of fleeting celebrity chic, embodied in the cartoon sexuality of poor Anna Nicole.

Green apple cotton candy is just wrong. Maybe I’ll take a ride down there soon and see if I can have some without eating raw fish in eel skin first.