OVERSEAS Travails
First published in The Independent 30 April 2008
Damn, Americans are huge! Not all of them mind, just a sizeable proportion. But I don’t think you can blame them entirely. The human arsehole simply was never designed to handle the amount of food they shovel down their guts.
True. Order a hamburger over here and what you get is basically a whole cow stuck between two buns, with a side salad and a pile of chips more or less equal to the seasonal potato crop output of the Lockyer Valley.
They don’t eat it all, of course. Just enough to make them very fat. Doubt that? One of my first meals over here was a snack (ha!) in one of those trendy seaside bars in Waikiki in Hawaii. Duke’s I think it was but it could easily have been Stinger Ray’s or Coconut Bobs or some other silly name – they all blur into a certain sameness – when I couldn't help but notice the couple not far from me.
Well, I noticed the bloke first, but only after he finally came into sight after making substantial inroads into a plate of nachos that was about a fifth the size of nearby Diamond Head.
He was big enough, but it wasn’t until the meal dwindled even further that I noticed he had a wife helping him in this mighty endeavour.
Well I think it was his wife. She was actually sitting a few tables away from him. I don’t think they were fighting or anything like that: she simply could not get any closer.
Boy, was she fat! She had more folds to her than a international Texas Hold ‘Em competition.
But you had to admire their tenacity in tackling their tucker. It was about this stage that the husband caught me staring at them. Now I could have been rude and said something like “Gosh, you two are huge!” but my mother always said to me if you can’t say something nice about people then it’s best to say nothing at all.
But I do think I recovered fairly quickly because I blurted out: “Great T-shirt!”
It said something like Beaver Springs or some such thing and he proudly declared that it was from his home state of Minnesota.
I didn’t tell him that when i said it was a great T-shirt, I meant that if you bleached it white, it would make a great movie screen.
Okay, enough already! I can already see the pages of next issue’s Indie filled with hate mail just because I’m taking the mickey out of people with a bit of lard on their ample frames.
And I accept that I’m no shrinking violet myself, after too many Fat Boys $4 brekkies over recent years. In fact it’s been a long time since I’ve been able to see my toes from the erect position. Come to think of it, it’s been quite a while since I’ve been able to even see that in the erect position.
But I think you’re getting my drift. If I stay in this country too long, I’m going to have to return home vie freight plane.
But I think a solution is at hand, and I’ve got recent events in Canberra to thank for it.
In the short time I’m over here, I’m going to try to set up a 20stone-20stone summit, where American couples can come along and chew the fat – let me rephrase that – work out solutions to their problems.
It’s going to be hard but .... wait a minute .. here’s the first good idea that should come out of the summit: why doesn’t the American hospitality industry offers up fare only HALF the size of what they do now?
The Yanks only eat half of what’s on their plate anyway. This one brave move would mean that the nation’s beef cattle numbers could be halved overnight. There’s a win-win situation for all: healthier Americans and millions less cattle farting up the ozone layer.
And seeing the servings are only half-size, maybe the cost of the meal could be halved too. That’s a win-win-win situation. I think this 20stone-20stone summit would be a great idea – but sadly I think it’s got less than a fat chance of ever taking place.
But while we’re on culinary matters, I hear that my fellow columnist Gary Balkin in this issue is in search of the best coffee on offer in inner-Brisbane. That’s fine, but I’ve got a tip for whoever makes the worse coffee around. Bring your brew over here and enter every national competition you can.
You’ll dead set clean up, because the coffee over here is absolute crap.
