Weird Food of the Week: The Big Ass Burger

Dateline: Arizona. You could also call it "Prophetic Food of the Week." On vacay in northern Arizona, I couldn't resist scoping out the native vittles. Behold the Big Ass Burger, served up at Scottsdale's Roaring Fork restaurant, composed of an astounding 12 ounces of beef, crispy bacon, Colby cheese, iceberg lettuce, tomato, and grilled onions. Because Arizona doesn't require restaurants to post nutritional facts (as New York City does), I can't give you an exact calorie count--but I do know that the beef alone brings it close to 1,000.

I have nothing against burgers; love them in fact, especially charred on the outside, a little pink on the inside, topped with bleu cheese, and resting on a pillowy toasted bun. BUT...much of that delectable pleasure is lost, swamped, overwhelmed by the sheer heft of 12 ounces of oleaginous beef. I do believe humans were designed and programmed to eat some meat--chased down on the savannah and greedily devoured; lean, protein-packed, life-giving meat--but not to waddle from car to restaurant table and cast oneself into a sea of factory-farmed, chopped-and-fried, fatty flesh.

The result of such regular excursions, of course, is the "big ass" of that (surely somewhat self-aware?) title. Bottom line (pardon the pun): just because you can do something doesn't mean you must--something food purveyors in the U.S. don't seem to have grasped.

All that said, if you do decide to splurge, just this once, on the Big Ass Burger, don't forget your Big Ass Fries--a remarkable case of life imitating art...thousands of years in the (ironic) future.

Reason #6,514 Why it's Easy to Gain Weight

Because our biggest, most powerful corporations keep telling us that really bad foods are actually really good for us. Latest case in point: Coca-Cola's VitaminWater. Coke has been assuring consumers that VitaminWater is, just as its name implies, "a vitamin-enhanced water beverage," and has used the phrase "vitamins + water = all you need" to promote it--when in truth it has nearly the sugar content of Coke itself.

If you go to VitaminWater's website, all you see are healthy young people skateboarding, surfing, modeling hip clothes, downloading playlists, and doing all those other energetic things you do when you're pumped up on vitamins. In fact, Coca-Cola--in this its 125th-anniversary year of peddling sugar-water--is desperately fighting off a class-action suit claiming that the company has been misleading consumers in suggesting that VitaminWater is anything other than sugar-water (with a few supplements mixed in as window-dressing).

Just today the company agreed to go to mediation (translation: they may be ready to settle just the get the damn thing out of the news). They've already lost one court battle: they tried to get the suit dismissed last year, protesting that their nutrition facts are there on the bottle for anyone to see--courtesy of FDA laws that even one of the most omnipotent companies on the globe can't get around. A judge last year ruled that, regardless of the small print, all the large print on the bottle violates what is known as the jelly-bean rule--a guideline that prohibits companies from claiming their nutritionally empty junk food is "healthy" because they've thrown in a little Vitamin C or calcium.

It's hard enough to keep one's waistline while navigating the obvious calorie calossi--the cheese-stuffed-crust pizzas, the hauntingly fragrant cinnabons that wreathe every airport and mall. The lies of the unscrupulous jelly-bean peddlers of the world make it well-nigh impossible. But then, why expect anything else from a corporation that fought long and hard to install soda machines in schools across the country? Hey, the kids can always opt for the "healthy" option: VitaminWater.

Image of the Week: "True Beauty"

At least, I think that's how Vogue Italia's coverline, "Belle Vere," translates to English. This month, Vogue's Italian cousin puts three plus-size models on its cover--and they are delicious, scrumptious, timeless (paging Sophia Loren), and real. Though "true" (vere) is perhaps the more perfect word: finally, some truth about women's bodies. The other subtext, of course: even big girls buy clothes.

Sometimes a Carrot is Just...a Carrot

The USDA plate has landed, and it looks oddly…familiar. A primary-colored circle divided into nearly equal quarters, it has clean, retro lines reminiscent of the 1950s Four Food Groups. The huge difference, of course, is that Fruits and Vegetables have moved up in the world—from one-quarter of the diet in the meat-centric ‘50s to a full one-half today. The plate is in fact almost aggressively, preternaturally basic in design: Look how easy this is! it proclaims. Eating right is child’s play!

 And in some ways, it is. But Americans have been making nutrition way too complicated for more than a century now. The first USDA recommendations for a healthy diet came out in the mid-1890s, on a wave of brand-spanking-new nutritional science. We’ve been in love with evidence-based eating ever since. And where has it gotten us? One has to wonder.

The New Math of Good Eating

Squares, triangles, circles…the U.S. government (specifically, the U.S. Department of Agriculture) has worked its way through the major geometric shapes in the past few decades while trying to convince a reluctant American public to eat better.  There was the Four Food Group model of the mid-twentieth-century (that’s the square), the Food Pyramid of 1992 (triangle), and now, coming soon, the Dinner Plate of the new millennium (circle). Yet somehow, we’re fatter and less healthy than we were even 20 years ago. Why does practically nothing the government says about good eating seem to get any traction?

1950s eating: oh-so-simple?

One thing is sure: none of the visual constructions dreamed up so far have been very coherent, and each raises almost more questions than it answers. For instance, in the Four Food Groups model, why does Dairy appear to account for a full one-quarter of the diet, seemingly equivalent to the entire universe of fruits and vegetables?  The answer to that may perhaps be found in the fact that the USDA has a duel mandate—to promote agriculture and to promote public health—and the dairy industry has some very skilled lobbyists when it comes to “promoting” the purported health benefits of milk.

And the Pyramid had an oddly counter-intuitive structure, in which the “good” stuff like grains, fruits, and vegetables were grouped at the (big, wide) bottom of the triangle, while the “bad” things one was to “limit” one’s intake of (like sweets and fats) were up at the tiny tippy-top.  Talk about over-thinking something: you can picture the creative types at the USDA coming up with that one, and disregarding the fact that the “top” of anything is almost always superior (“You’re the top/You’re the Coliseum,” sang Cole Porter).

Climbing the pyramid...wrong by wrong

Then there is just the utter failure of the Pyramid to teach us much of anything worth knowing.  We were told to gorge on those bottom-dwellers—the grains and cereals.  As my former shrink liked to say, “And how’s that workin’ for ya?”  Since 20 years of Pyramid eating have brought our collective national weight gain to an all-time high, I think we’d have to respond at this point: Not so well.  Only now are we figuring out that too many carbs, like too much of anything, are bad for your health and your waistline.

Enter the new, improved USDA Healthy Eating paradigm: the Food Circle, or Plate, soon to be unveiled by the USDA.  The Agency is currently coyly leaking details about the plan, hoping to drum up interest from a nutrition-news-numbed public.  What they’ll spill so far: The plate’s first distinguishing characteristic is that one-half of it should be filled with fruits and vegetables.  So at least fruits and veggies have moved up in the world, from one-quarter of the diet in the 1950s, to one-half now.

That is all well, good—and improbable.  When was the last time you saw a plate of food from any kind of American food outlet—fast food, middle-American cuisine (the Applebee’s/Olive Garden ilk), or even haute cuisine—that was half vegetable matter?  The word “salad” is so cavalierly applied these days that a recent study found that “healthy eaters” (aka dieters) ended up consuming more calories than carefree burger-guzzlers because they consciously ordered entrees with healthy-sounding names.  The problem: items like the Tortilla-Bowl Salad or the Caesar with Chicken often ended up being more caloric than the decadent-sounding pastas and red-meat choices.

Not to sound defeatist, but I don’t think a square, triangle, or circle is going to solve our health and obesity conundrums. Perhaps that’s because “eating right” is both too simple and too complicated to be boiled down to a mathematical formula.  It’s simple like this: foods that grow in the earth are good for you, as are foods bought fresh (not packaged in boxes and plastic bags to be popped into the microwave) and then cooked with a modicum of good sense and reasonable amounts of oil.  It’s complicated like this: hardly anyone even knows how to cook anymore (or is willing to devote the time and effort to it), and our entire culture is now geared to convenience and speed when it comes to eating.  It certainly doesn’t help that we have a gang-busters food industry, both in grocery stores in restaurant chains, working nonstop to increase our consumption of those “bad” goodies at the tip of the triangle.

My advice: in honor of the new USDA Plate, make a vow to spend an entire week eating only fresh and homemade foods, with a particular eye towards fruits and vegetables (summer makes that easy).  Weigh yourself before and after the week.  See what happens.  (Oh, and get out there and move your body--but that's another story...)  Let me know how it goes!

No Free Skinny

Of course it was too good to be true, like something from a futuristic Neverland.  The narrative went like this: You don’t like that pocket of pudge that won’t budge no matter how much you diet or work out?  Those saddlebags—just like Mom’s!—or that tummy, or the infamous batwings—paging Mrs. Sterling, your sixth grade math teacher…It’s astonishing the level of vitriol and loathing that has been directed towards these innocent targets.  So, zap them away, simply sculpt a new body, Pygmalion-like.  Presto, bags/pooch/wings disappear, courtesy of your friendly plastic surgeon and his/her cannula—a word that has made me shudder since I first heard it.  A cannula is a thin metal tube that liposuction surgeons insert under your skin and then move back and forth, breaking up fat tissue and sucking it out.  Liquid fat.  As Miss Clavel would say, “Something is not right!”

But liposuction has been insanely popular—despite the yuck factor, the painful recovery, the chance of “ripples,” and the small-but-present risk of death from complications.  Last year it was the second most common cosmetic—or “aesthetic,” as the docs like to call it—surgery, coming in at almost 300,000 procedures and nestled between boob jobs at #1 and eyelid lifts at #3.  Last week the other shoe dropped, thanks to researchers at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.  They conducted the first randomized, controlled trial of lipo in humans, and documented the tragic flaw that many doctors and patients have already observed first-hand: The fat comes back.

Food and Sex (Finally)

 As an antidote to Friday’s serious-minded treatise about the economics of obesity, I offer this friendly little tidbit, which was leaked from a forthcoming book on internet porn titled A Billion Wicked Thoughts: Three times more men search for “overweight women” than “underweight women” when seeking out porn images on the Web.  I know, I know: “underweight women” doesn’t sound like a phrase that pops into guys’ heads as they’re googling for fantasy material (“slender women with unusually large breasts” seems more likely, though probably using a few choice words I won't get into here), but still…the comparison gives a bit of credence to the very logical notion that men don’t consider a bag-o’-bones to be a sexy bedmate.  When choosing between skinny and heavy, they’d much rather grab something cuddly.  This goes out to every woman who ever felt self-conscious before, during, or after the deed.