I can make you hate (14 page)

Eating huge quantities of food is an unobtainable fantasy for some and an everyday luxury for others. To Adam Richman, voracious host of
Man vs Food
, it’s a career choice.

Man vs Food
is obscene on many levels, but daft on several more. The format couldn’t be much simpler: every week,
Rich-man
travels to a city (Memphis this time) and samples its most notorious ‘pig out joints’: the sort of quintessentially American restaurants where everything is charbroiled or smoked or sizzled to death in a deep fat fryer vat the size of a swimming pool; places where each mammoth portion comes with a side order of type two diabetes. Establishments of this kind often tend to have a ‘challenge’ item on the menu – a dish so offensively huge, anyone who successfully manages to eat it has their portrait hung on the wall. The end of each episode sees Richman taking on one of these challenges, hence the title. That’s all there is to it.

Essentially this is
Top Gear
for food: a jokey, blokey exercise in excessive indulgence. It’s all sensation, sensation, sensation. Just as Clarkson emits orgasmic whimpers when his driver’s seat judders on acceleration, so Richman groans like a man having his perineum tongued by three cheerleaders as he ingests each warm mouthful of stodge. If food is the new porn, this is an all-out orgy between wobbling gutsos and farmyard animals – a snuff orgy, no less, since the latter end up sawn in half and smothered in BBQ sauce.

Plenty of cattle get eaten; at times Richman may as well lie down, open his gob and let a herd stampede directly into his stomach. Entire carcasses are greedily consumed by overweight folk with juice dribbling down their chins, tearing flesh from charred bones with their glistening teeth. It’s like sitting in Sawney Bean’s cave. Meat and skeletons, meat and skeletons. A sequence in which Richman peers inside an oven at Memphis’s premier rib
joint to witness a landscape of scorched and smouldering ribcages almost resembles the aftermath of the Dresden firebombing. This is definitely not a programme for vegetarians.

Things reach an insane peak (or more accurately, trough), as Richman takes on the eating challenge. This week he faces the 7½-pound ‘Sasquatch Burger’ at the Big Foot Lodge. 1,300 people have attempted to eat one; only four have succeeded. This high failure rate is hardly surprising when you see the bloody thing: it’s the size of a sofa cushion. The bun alone accounts for two pounds. The burger itself is an ominous cake of mashed cow as thick as your thigh. When he first tucks in, Richman is chirpy and cocky, shovelling handfuls of meat down his neck with the gluttonous abandon of a self-aware Homer Simpson. Several minutes later, as it becomes clear he still has an immense mountain of food to get through, he appears sickened and woozy – presumably because his blood sugar levels have hit a dangerously narcotic high as his stomach desperately tries to break down the busload of beef that’s just appeared inside it. This is the point at which the show stops being fun. It’s like watching a man dealing with an instant, unexpected pregnancy.

But what I’d really like to see is what happens the next morning, when the show presumably turns into
Man vs Poo
, as Richman empties the dauntingly substantial, hopelessly compacted contents of his engorged colon, clenching the bathroom doorhandle between his teeth as he attempts to give birth to a leg-sized hunk of fecal sod without killing himself. Cue footage of him sweating, shaking and sobbing like a man impaled on a clay tree, before eventually squeezing out a log with the dimensions and weight of a dead gazelle in a greased sleeping bag. As he mops his brow (and backside), he smiles weakly with exhausted triumph, whispers farewell, and the credits roll. And we’ve all learned something about the price of excess.

Time is the strangest substance known to man. You can’t see, touch, hear, smell, taste or avoid it. Time makes you
stronger-minded
but weaker-bodied, gradually transforming you from blushing grape to ornery, grouching raisin. Time is the most precious thing you have, yet you’re happiest when you’re wasting it. Time will outlive you, your offspring, your offspring’s robots and your offspring’s robots’ springs. It will outlive the wind and the rocks, the sun and the moon, Florence and the Machine. Time, in short, is King of Things.

Because time is invisible, it’s hard to work out which bit to focus on at any given moment. It’s even hard to work out just how long ‘any given moment’ is. Right now, as you’re reading this article, are you absorbing it by the paragraph, by the sentence, or on a word-by-word basis? When I type the word ‘word’, does time temporarily slow down while you hear the word ‘word’ spoken aloud in your mind, or have you already leapt ahead to discover the end of the sentence doesn’t sense quite make? How big a ‘timeslice’ can your awareness eat in one go?

The more time you swallow in one sitting, the wiser you become. In Kurt Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse Five
, we’re introduced to the Tralfamadorians, an alien race who can see in four dimensions. They experience life not as a linear sequence of unexpected events, but a timeline of inexorable peaks and troughs, occurring simultaneously. Tralfamadorians aren’t upset by tragic events or overjoyed at happy events, because the concept of ‘events’ has no meaning; to them, sunrise, sunset, birth, death, peace, war are all just notches on the same stick. When confronted with tragedy, they merely shrug and say, ‘So it goes.’ That’s why there’s never been a Tralfamadorian on
EastEnders
.

Anyway, while most people don’t perceive life with the
worrisome
scope of a Tralfamadorian, they’re capable of projecting
at least a little. Take joggers. They weren’t born with a
pre-programmed
desire to jog. No. One day they decided they’d like to get fit, and chose to sacrifice their immediate comfort in favour of delayed gratification: they got off the sofa and jogged themselves slim.

Every jogger is essentially a clairvoyant. They’ve transcended the shackles of contemporary subsistence and risen above the likes of you and me, to witness a vision of the future so captivating it blocks out the pain of the present, so enticing, they’re literally compelled to run towards it. Not only that, they’ve been organised enough to buy proper trainers and shorts and everything, the smug bastards. No wonder everyone else wants to hit them. Here’s a tip: visualise a future in which you’ve toned yourself to athletic perfection by fighting random joggers in the park. Here’s another tip: wear some sort of mask. And maybe a cape. We’ll come up with a logo for your chest plate later.

Joggers are a minority, but then exercisers generally are a minority. Even though we’re repeatedly told that regular exercise combats heart disease and cancer and blah blah nag nag nag, more than 60 per cent of the population couldn’t be arsed trying, because it makes their legs ache. They’re not necessarily lazy, but suffering from an inability to perceive the future as a solid and tangible thing, unlike those far-sighted seers in running shoes and sweat pants. Perhaps joggers have a few additional Tralfamadorian synapses; only by experimenting on their brains can we be sure. Meanwhile, the rest of us remain stubbornly wedged into narrow individual pockets of time, moaning that we need to lose a few pounds while sobbing into our chips.

And we do the same with the environment: we fail to take painful measures in the present that could ease our existence in the future, because we think they’re too arduous – unless you’re a spluttering contrarian, in which case you think the whole
climate-change
thing is a load of trumped-up phooey anyway, and that all scientists are shifty, self-serving exaggerators, apart from the brave
handful who agree with you. Hey, I’m no scientist. I’m not an engineer either, but if I asked a hundred engineers whether it was safe to cross a bridge, and ninety-nine said no, I’d probably try to find another way over the ravine rather than loudly siding with the underdog and arguing about what constitutes a consensus while trundling across in my Hummer.

Still, it’s easy to picture a collapsing bridge. Picturing a collapsing environment is trickier. Hollywood has tried its best, but all I learned from sitting through
The Day After Tomorrow
is that, contrary to my previous expectations, the end of the world might be boring.

What we need, if we’re really going to work in unison to
overcome
climate change is a mix of Tralfamadorian perspective and joggers’ resolve: to let visions of the future dictate our present, rather than the other way round.

So: we need to loosen mankind’s dogged grip on a linear
interpretation
of time if we’re going to save the planet. But how? We can’t go round injecting our brains with Tralfamadorian grey matter, because it doesn’t exist. Instead the closest thing we have is LSD, which must be pumped into the water supply as a matter of urgency. A couple of months of steady supply should be enough to expand our collective perception.

Let’s start by testing it out on Stourbridge (no reason; just picked it at random: sorry Stourbridge). The results can be televised live. It’ll be funny watching them trying to eat their own ankles or chase the town hall into the sky: just like
It’s a Knockout
, but with a sense of civic purpose.

Yes. For all our sakes, this must happen
NOW
.

I’m a lightweight; always have been. I didn’t get properly drunk until I was twenty-five, on a night out which culminated in a spectacular public vomiting in a Chinese restaurant.

Ever wondered what the clatter of sixty pairs of chopsticks being simultaneously dropped in disgust might sound like? Don’t ask me. I can’t remember. I was too busy bitterly coughing what remained of my guts all over the carpet.

Not a big drinker, then. Like virtually every other member of my generation, I smoked dope throughout my early twenties. It prevented me from getting bored, but also prevented me from achieving much. When you’re content to blow an entire fortnight basking on your sofa like a woozy sea lion, playing
Super Bomberman
, eating Minstrels and sniggering at Alastair Stewart’s bombastic voiceover on
Police Camera Action!
there’s not much impetus to push yourself.

Marijuana detaches you from the world, like a big pause button. The moment I stopped smoking it I started actually getting stuff done. I still sit on my sofa playing videogames, necking sweets and laughing at the telly, but these days if I have to leave my cocoon and pop to the corner shop to buy a pint of milk before they close, it’s a minor inconvenience rather than a protracted mission to Mars. That was the worst thing about being stoned: there came an inevitable point every evening where you’d find yourself shuffling around a massively overlit local convenience store feeling alien and jittery. Brrr. No thanks.

I tried other things, only to discover they weren’t for me. LSD, for instance, definitely isn’t my bag. Call me traditional, but if I glance at a wall and before my very eyes it suddenly starts sliding around like oil on water, my initial reaction is not to be amused or amazed, but alarmed about the structural integrity of the building.

My most benign lysergic experience consisted of an
hour-long
stroll around an incredibly verdant, sun-drenched meadow, watching the names of famous sportsmen appear before me in gigantic 3D letters carved from fiery gold. Eventually someone passed me a cup of tea and the spell was broken: there I was, sitting in a student hall of residence, watching late-night golf on BBC2 on a tiny black-and-white TV. From that point on it was like being trapped in a David Lynch film that lasted for eight hours and was set in Streatham.

Once again: Brrr. No thanks.

These days I’m sickeningly lily-livered, by choice rather than necessity. I don’t smoke, I drink only occasionally, and I’d sooner saw my own feet off than touch anything harder than a double espresso. I don’t want to get out of my head: that’s where I live.

In summary: if I’ve learned anything, it’s that I don’t much care for mood-altering substances. But I’m not afraid of them either. With one exception.

It’s perhaps the biggest threat to the nation’s mental wellbeing, yet it’s freely available on every street – for pennies. The dealers claim it expands the mind and bolsters the intellect: users experience an initial rush of emotion (often euphoria or rage), followed by what they believe is a state of enhanced awareness.

Tragically this ‘awareness’ is a delusion. As they grow
increasingly
detached from reality, heavy users often exhibit impaired decision-making abilities, becoming paranoid, agitated and quick to anger. In extreme cases they’ve even been known to form mobs and attack people. Technically it’s called ‘a newspaper’, although it’s better known by one of its many ‘street names’, such as ‘The Currant Bun’ or ‘The Mail’ or ‘The Grauniad’ (see me – Ed.).

In its purest form, a newspaper consists of a collection of facts which, in controlled circumstances, can actively improve knowledge. Unfortunately, facts are expensive, so to save costs and drive up sales, unscrupulous dealers often ‘cut’ the basic
contents with cheaper material, such as wild opinion, bullshit, empty hysteria, reheated press releases, advertorial padding and photographs of Lady Gaga with her bum hanging out. The hapless user has little or no concept of the toxicity of the end product: they digest the contents in good faith, only to pay the price later when they find themselves raging incoherently in pubs, or – increasingly – on internet messageboards.

Tragically, widespread newspaper abuse has become so endemic, it has crippled the country’s ability to conduct a sensible debate about the ‘war on drugs’. The current screaming festival over ‘meow meow’ or ‘M-Cat’ or whatever else the actual users aren’t calling it, is a textbook example. I have no idea how dangerous it is, but there seems to be a glaring lack of correlation between the threat it reportedly poses and the huge number of schoolkids reportedly taking it.