Fowl Play: Wherein Anything Worth Doing is Worth Overdoing

YUM! This year's Yuletide feast in England: "We are going to eat a PETA activist stuffed inside a Greenpeace activist stuffed inside a Animal 'Rights' activist stuffed inside Gordon Brown's voluminous carcass (with a non-'Fair Trade' apple stuffed into his mouth). Now THAT is a Christmas dinner!

No, THIS is a Christmas Dinner! It serves 125, takes eight hours to cook and is stuffed with 12 different birds First there was:

TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's creation of a ten-bird roast on his show two years ago.

He stuffed an 18lb turkey with a goose, duck, mallard, guinea fowl, chicken, pheasant, partridge, pigeon and woodcock - producing a remarkable Russian doll-like dish.

Now there is:

a behemoth containing no fewer than 48 birds of 12 different species.

This massive roast, the proud creation of Devon farmer Anne Petch, weighs almost four stone [56 pounds] (more than most airlines' baggage allowance), costs [$1,330], and has enough meat to serve 125 people.

It contains about 50,000 calories and takes more than eight hours to cook in an industrialducksized [sic] oven.

Anne, who runs the Heal Farm shop near Kings Nympton, said: "The True Love Roast has a bird for each of the 12 days of Christmas.

"It uses skinless breast meat from several birds of each species with flavours that work well together."

Here's what the ingredients look like.

1. Turkey, 2. Goose, 3. Barbary duck, 4. Guinea fowl, 5. Mallard, 6. Poussin, 7. Quail, 8. Partridge, 9. Pigeon squab, 10. Pheasant, 11. Chicken, 12. Aylesbury duck

Now I'm leaning towards the first menu (Gordon Brown with a soft and chewy PETA activist center), but only as a hearth ornament. As for the gigantic gut bomb proposed and produced and marketed under the amusing rubric "True Love Roast" ... I think I'll pass if only to avoid the risk of salmonella and the certainty of a food coma for myself and 124 of my closest friends.

One of the commenters to the story writes, as Samizadata underscores:

See, it's because of madness like this that the terrorists hate us
- Marcus, Northampton, UK

Well, as our French friends would shrug, "Tant pis." Let them eat falafel.

Still, I do think it underscores one reason that many parts of the world do envy the West in general and America in particular. In brief, we have way too much food in this country. But that is, after all, as it should be.

The difference between the goose-fat drenched decadence of England and the limitless waving fields of grain in America is that we don't do it just for those chinless upper-class twits who can plop down a grand and a half for dinner before claret, but for all. It's not just the rich that can have le grand bouffe. It's everybody. Indeed, we have had so much le grand bouffe at the 510 item buffet restaurants, that we are now on a mission to reduce all that food without really reducing it. Where the Brits stuff bird into bird (It is best to remember that a British national insult is, "Get stuffed!"), America is busy taking the stuffing out of the national dish, the fast food hamburger.

It's the little things, and not the big birds, that can really underscore a nation's greatness.

Even during a decade in which the United States knocked over two insane despotisms in the middle of the Middle East, bracketed Iran , put airfields and planes about ten minutes from Syria, and still found the time and pocket change to boost a couple of remote-controlled golf carts to Mars, it is still the small pure products of America that make me gasp with admiration.

Even during a year when the whines and blather of an intensely hateful opposition of anklebiters and pseudo-intellectuals infesting mass media and the petrified forests of academe predicted economic doom, the society responded with unexpected growth, expressing the gargantuan strength and steel sinew of America in the minuscule.

Even during a time when a run-up to a Presidential election has resembled the debut of "The Teabagging of Snow White by the Eight Dwarfs" down at the Bada-Bing Adult Cinema, it is the lesser items of American life that illuminate the greater truths.

For in the midst of all the carping and the whining this is still a country that cares enough about the little people to do this:

Burger King Corp. is joining the low-carbohydrate parade by offering Bunless Whopper hamburgers and, soon, salads featuring steak, chicken and shrimp.

The Bunless sandwiches, which will be available nationwide beginning Tuesday, will come in plastic salad bowls, with knife and fork.
--- Burger King to Market Bunless Whoppers

Again, the American microcosm reveals the American macrocosm. Ponder that item for a mere moment. Meditate on the deeper truth that is revealed in the simple and mundane mantra, 'Bunless Whopper.'

And what is jewel in the center of the 'Bunless Whopper' lotus? It is as clear as a $4 bottle of reconstituted tap water. What the birth of the 'Bunless Whopper' tells us without question is that the United States of America has at last achieved the most ancient dream, not only of humanity, but of life itself.

Yes, America has finally arrived at the alpha and omega point of life on earth. Today we stand at the top of the long, hard and deadly climb from the primeval soup. Today the Capitol of the Free World, the First Place Finisher of the Free World, the Crown of Creation and Cradle of Democracy is safe at home at last with 'Bunless Whopper.; each one served 'in plastic salad bowls, with knife and fork.'

We have in America, right now, what all other cultures and nations and empires have dreamed of since before the dawn of time. We have, finally, created a society that produces

Way-Too-Much-Food™

. After aeons of the nightmare of Never-Enough-Food™ we now awake into the brave new Bunless Whopper World. We are the kings and queens of the Global Food Court, and our national sport is double dipping at the salad bar as we supersize everything from soup to nuts (But hold the bun).

Let the limp Brits struggle to keep up by piling in the birds. We cock our snoots at them by taking away the bun.

In fact, we are now so firmly established in the

Way-Too-Much-Food™

universe that we are about to pass through a chronosynclasticinfandibulem into the alternate universe where the kid at the cash register says, "Would you like to downsize these fries?" or, "Usted tiene gusto de downsize estas fritadas?" as the case may be.

I know, I know, They will tell you that people in America go to bed hungry every night. And They will be right. They will tell you ( because They live to tell you), that you must think of "the starving children of Appalachia" (urban or rural), and so you will because you always think about what They so compulsively must tell you.

But, at the same time, the same They are also going to tell you that you, or others like you, or others that you may know, or may see on the street (but seldom at a bikini contest on the beach) are much too fat. They will tell you that people, especially 'the children,' ('They' love to drag in 'the children' at every opportunity.) are getting too obese, and by God the government needs to step in and 'do something.'

This 'something' will invariably be a host of new regulations written by Them (Many of whom work for the government and are teeteringly obese. ), and directed at large corporations to "inform the public" more about the fact that

Way-Too-Much-Food™

will make you 'way-to-much-fat.' They need to tell you this because it is a message that really hasn't been sufficiently promulgated by the nation's book, magazine, newspaper, radio, television, dietary supplement companies, and Oprah.

After the new regulations 'telling people what is good for them' have zero effect at halting the

Way-Too-Much-Food™

intake, They will make their next move. They will, 'for your own good,' make some laws to limit 'way-too-much-food.' Michael Bloomberg, the Death Dwarf of New York City, is on the cutting edge of his elevator shoes here.

Following rapidly on the heels of those elevator shoes there will be more laws that They will make 'for your own good.' This is because, when you get right down to it we may have

Way-Too-Much-Food™

but we obviously have a real shortage of laws in this country. These laws will come complete with a raft of studies, convocations, symposiums, and finally the really big gun, the class-action law suits directed at the deepest pockets around.

Bribed experts from academe will blather at $500 and hour plus expenses in hundreds of courtrooms.

Morbidly obese victims without number will waddle in front of morbidly clueless juries without peer in an effort to suck morbidly huge settlements from the coffers of companies who have produced

Way-Too-Much-Food™

for decades.

Judges busy digesting way-too-much-lunch will drowse on their benches for months and years at a time.

Discovery motions will uncover mountain ranges of documentation going back decades that prove, PROVE, that McDonalds' executives knew the Big Mac has six grams too much secret sauce for the heart of average American who wants to hoover up ten meals a day and live to 120. The companies that feed America for next to nothing will be found guilty of a conspiracy to feed people

Way-Too-Much-Food™

for way-too-little money. (The top restaurants that charge $20 a bite in Los Angles, New York, and DC will get a pass so that power lunching may continue. Ditto the importing of the $1,330 multi-bird dinner from England to jade the palates of all our millionaires with way too much money to think hungry ever again.)

And when it is all said and done and run up to the Supreme Court, and the checks are cut, the only Americans who will then be getting far-too-fat will be the members of the Trial Lawyers Association, the tools of Expert Academe who have shilled for them, and the politician with his hand out "lookin' for a new friend." They'll be out have the $1000 omelet.

Since the time of the slime mold, all life has been looking for food and not ever finding enough. Until now. We finally made it happen, cheap and in abundance. But that's just not good enough.

Way-Too-Much-Food™

will have been judged to be, in the final analysis, un-American for poor people and little children. And you. It's the American Way.
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[PETA apron illustration via the illustrious Bingley @ The Coalition of the Swilling.]
[Pointer via Rand Simberg

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Posted by Vanderleun at December 16, 2007 4:48 PM | TrackBack
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