Food: A Love Story

by Jim Gaffigan

  HOUSE OF CARBS

  A very important subsegment of the restaurant industry is breakfast restaurants. Well, I call them breakfast restaurants. Many of my single friends enjoy going out to fancy places for breakfast or brunch on weekends. They meet up, gossip, and giggle about the adventures they had the night before. I’m not talking about those places. I’m talking about the breakfast restaurants where I can take my five screaming children and feed them for around twenty dollars while I witness them do about forty dollars’ worth of damage to the establishment. These are usually chain restaurants that serve other meals besides breakfast, but breakfast made them famous because it’s the only thing anyone wants to eat there. You are more likely to get the pancakes than the veggie burger at the IHOP. You’d rather go to Denny’s for the Grand Slam breakfast than the avocado salad. You get the idea. I seem to be in chain breakfast restaurants either in the morning with my screaming children or late, late at night after shows with slurring adult-children. It’s really not that different of an atmosphere.

  IHOP

  The most famous breakfast restaurant chain is probably IHOP, which seems like a strange name for a place. Whenever I’ve eaten at IHOP, I never really feel like hopping. ICanBarelyMove feels more appropriate. Maybe INeedAWheelchair. The IHOP is famous for its pancakes, yet the entire restaurant seems like a syrup exhibit. Every table in IHOP is equipped with its own caddy filled with an assortment of syrups (maple, strawberry, blueberry, butter pecan, and boysenberry). Each of the syrup containers is personally licked by a similar assortment of five-year-olds. As a result of the syrup being preplaced on the table, there is not an inch of an International House of Pancakes that has not been touched by syrup, even the bathrooms. To prepare for the next morning, at the end of the night an IHOP employee even mops the floor with syrup.

  Waffle House

  My favorite of the breakfast restaurant chains is Waffle House.

  Waffle House is similar to the International House of Pancakes, but instead of pancakes they serve waffles. I’m not sure if it’s intentional, but the Waffle House vibe feels more like that of a halfway house or a mobile home than an actual house. I’ll never forget the first time I walked into a Waffle House. It was in Tampa, Florida, in 1989. All I could think was Wow, I owe the IHOP an enormous apology. The moment you enter most Waffle Houses, you get the sense the staff stopped caring a long time ago or never did. You’ll never hear “Nice job cleaning up” in a Waffle House. If you’ve never had the chance to visit a Waffle House, simply imagine a gas station bathroom that serves waffles. That sums up the atmosphere pretty well.

  I love everything about the Waffle House experience and not just because watching someone fry an egg while they smoke a cigarette reminds me of my dad. I love how the waitress approaches the table with an attitude that says, “Okay, I’ll pretend to be your server before I go back to the kitchen area and pretend to be your chef.” I mostly go to Waffle House after midnight with comedian friends following shows, when the clientele is at its ripest. Many of the patrons are drunk, which explains why there are pictures of the food on the menu. I’m not sure how drunk someone would have to be to not remember what a waffle looks like. “Oh, yeah, it’s like a plaid pancake.” The folks in a Waffle House after midnight are a motley bunch of twenty-year-olds, Vietnam vets, and elderly couples ignoring each other. It feels a little like a family reunion for me, or maybe a white-trash convention. Waffle House is so filled with white trash, it actually makes the International House of Pancakes appear international. Everyone seems to be dressed in camo, on the verge of passing out, or muttering into a coffee cup, regretting the past twenty years of their lives. It’s like you walked into a scene out of The Deer Hunter. I’ve seen a gun up close five times in my life, and three of them have been in a Waffle House. There is always an air of danger after midnight in Waffle House. The Waffle House sign, with its individual block letters, is even reminiscent of a ransom note. Occasionally there will be a letter burnt out in the electric Waffle House sign, so the sign will read affle house. You never hear of anything good happening at a Waffle House after midnight. “Another disease was cured at Waffle House last night.” Even the hash brown section of the Waffle House menu reads like a serial killer to-do list: “Smothered, covered, diced, and scattered.” Despite all these unbecoming attributes, Waffle House is where so many nocturnal folks, including myself, seem to go for a late-night meal. The Waffle House slogan should really be “It’s 2:00 a.m. There’s still time to make one more bad decision.”

  THE CELEBRATION OF FOOD

  Everyone seems to gain weight during the holidays. Unfortunately, the way I eat, I often find myself gaining weight for the holidays. The positive spin on my approach is that it makes the holiday weight gain seem less dramatic. As we all know, holidays are special days to commemorate historical and cultural events or famous dead people. For some reason we typically celebrate these events or honor these dead famous people by overeating on holidays. To clarify, I am talking about holidays in the American sense of the word, because, for some reason, people in the British Commonwealth call any vacation a “holiday,” which is weird and somewhat annoying, but it actually applies here too, because on a holiday (a day, not a vacation) we eat like we are on vacation (a holiday for you English-speaking foreigners). This is what you call a cross-cultural reference. I don’t know why a holiday or a vacation naturally leads to overeating. Maybe we feel like we’ve earned it. Well, I feel like I have earned it. Don’t judge me. You’re the one reading a book about food.

  In a way, holidays chronicle my unhealthy living throughout a given year.

  First Quarter

  I start off the year with the best intentions. It’s a new year filled with hope and possibility. I resolve to lose weight, live healthier, and overall be more like Oprah. In almost reactionary behavior to December, I stumble through January somberly observing Martin Luther King Jr. Day and contemplating who is actually attending those white sales on Presidents’ Day. It seems to be going along nicely until the first Sunday in February. The first attack on my impressive few weeks of somewhat healthy living is Super Bowl Sunday. While not an official holiday, the Super Bowl provides the strongest competition to Thanksgiving on the food-overconsumption front. Unlike Thanksgiving, there is no facade of gratitude or family time … it’s all about football and food. Thanksgiving may go food, then football, but Super Bowl Sunday is simply eat food, watch football while you eat food, and then eat more food. The food served on Super Bowl Sunday is all handheld and makes the Thanksgiving meal look like a health shake. It’s like a college fraternity catered a funeral. Buffalo wings, pigs in a blanket, chips and guacamole are usually the healthiest offerings, and this is right and good because, after all, it is called the “super bowl,” not the “diet plate.”

  Barely guilt ridden after my Super Bowl binge, I slog through early February with its horrible weather and no football and brace for Valentine’s Day. Around Valentine’s Day is when I really lose my way. The fatigue of winter has set in, and even though by some miracle I am in a relationship, the awkward romantic pressure of Valentine’s Day seems to prompt unjustifiable chocolate consumption. Valentine’s Day seems to be a day shaped to create failed expectations. The whole idea of a day constructed around romance seems counterintuitive. It’s like a surprise birthday party that you know about and aren’t in the mood for. You can stop a surprise birthday party, but you can’t stop Valentine’s Day. Everything seems a little forced on Valentine’s Day. This is even evident in the amount of candy consumed. One of the Valentine’s Day traditions is giving each other those big red heart-shaped boxes filled with the gamble chocolates. I’ve never eaten any chocolate out of those big red hearts with any confidence. I always think, This could either be really good or totally nasty, but I’m just pig enough to find out. I usually get the piece filled with the pink toothpaste. Then naturally I have to eat another nine to get rid of that flavor. There seems to be no logic in why certain chocolates
were included in the heart-shaped box. One time I’m pretty sure I bit into a chocolate-covered acorn. Valentine’s Day also offers the tiny chalk heart-shaped antacids that are one of the few things that make unsweetened baking chocolate seem appealing. “I know I make you nauseous so here’s a Tums with ‘hug me’ written on it.”

  March brings Saint Patrick’s Day, which is also known as the “Overdrinking Academy Awards.” Saint Patrick’s Day is supposed to be an ethnic celebration based on an English saint who converted Ireland to Christianity and drove the snakes out. It usually feels more like sanctioned binge drinking. They say, “Everyone is Irish on Saint Patrick’s Day,” and I’m starting to think that is most certainly not a compliment. I always imagine Saint Patrick looking down from heaven mumbling, “What are they doing? I hated beer.” Some of the overconsumption of alcohol on Saint Patrick’s Day is a function of the Irish stereotype of a love of drinking, but I think it has even more to do with how bad corned beef and cabbage tastes. I am an American of Irish heritage. You may recall earlier that I mentioned the Saint Patrick’s Day traditions of my childhood—that we would eat corned beef and cabbage for dinner. After that my mom would encourage my siblings and me to go into the yard looking for a leprechaun. If we caught a leprechaun, we would supposedly get a pot of gold. I realize now she probably just wanted some time alone so she could eat something delicious that was not corned beef and cabbage. Even she knew she made it wrong.

  It’s strange being an Irish American. Alcohol is woven into the ethnic pride. As a teenager I felt pressure to like Guinness. It’s an acquired taste, but Guinness is presented to the Irish American as being as familiar as mother’s milk. This is probably because Guinness has the same chemical composition as your Irish American mother’s milk. As a teenager I remember thinking, I want to like this, but I don’t see it happening. Now I sometimes enjoy a Guinness, but I’m not crazy about the wait. You could write the entire Guinness World Records book while you wait for a Guinness to be poured in a bar. Often, instead of ordering a Guinness, I’ll just tell the bartender, “I’d like to wait an hour for my beer.” He knows what I mean.

  Second Quarter

  Spring is a period of renewal. To celebrate this period of joy and rebirth, I eat candy. Easter is one of the most sacred holidays for Christians, yet the rituals always felt very strange to me. I don’t understand where most holiday traditions came from, but the egg seems to play a particularly confusing role at Easter. I always imagine how the conversation occurred.

  GUY 1: Easter is the day Jesus rose from the dead. What should we do?

  GUY 2: How about eggs?

  GUY 1: Well, what does that have to do with Jesus?

  GUY 2: All right, we’ll hide them.

  GUY 1: I don’t follow your logic.

  GUY 2: Don’t worry. There’s a bunny.

  It’s not just the involvement of eggs that makes Easter traditions so bizarre. It’s also the absurdity of letting young children handle the fragile eggs. Thank God the colorful eggs are hard-boiled because, wait for it, LITTLE KIDS BREAK EGGS. Kids can’t even dye the eggs without breaking them. Every year on the Thursday before Easter, Jeannie and I dye hard-boiled eggs with our young children. Let’s just say there’s usually a lot of egg salad eaten on Good Friday. To make matters more interesting, since we live in New York City, Jeannie and I hide the remaining unbroken eggs in our apartment and then ask our children to find them. That’s right. We are voluntarily embracing the great likelihood of a rotten egg being hidden in our small, smell-friendly apartment.

  Painting eggs and looking for them is amusing, but like most five-year-olds, I focus on the more unique Easter food. Chocolate bunnies, chocolate eggs, and, of course, Peeps, which are the candy corn of Easter. Nostalgia is the only thing keeping Peeps in circulation. Fact: Stale Peeps are far better than fresh Peeps, so take care to break the plastic wrapper the night before Easter to allow appropriate hardening. I’m talking the night before Easter a year before the Easter you plan to eat them.

  Recently Americans started celebrating Cinco de Mayo, perhaps less out of respect for the large number of Mexican Americans here and more to provide an excuse to have a party in May. Cinco de Mayo serves as almost a sequel to Saint Patrick’s Day, but instead of just binging on alcohol, we overconsume alcohol AND food. Excitement for spring and the fact that tacos, burritos, enchiladas, and pretty much all Mexican foods are some of the greatest things on this planet made Cinco de Mayo an inevitable American holiday. In a lot of ways, the American celebration of Cinco de Mayo feels like a marketing stunt by the makers of Corona beer and Old El Paso products. For some reason I don’t understand, Cinco de Mayo always seems to be on or around the fifth of May.

  Third Quarter

  During summer the weather is nice, which means people love to eat outside. To kick off these warmer months, Americans observe Memorial Day to honor the heroes who gave their lives for this country and, more important, to celebrate the first day they can break out the grill. This love of grilling and picnicking is most notable on Independence Day. The day we as a country became free to eat whatever we wanted. The Fourth of July is another fine example of how we use holidays as an excuse to overeat. “Normally I don’t eat a burger, a brat, AND a steak, but it is the Fourth of July, and I’m gonna need the energy if I’m going to be blowing things up. Besides, that is what the Founding Fathers would want.” August feels like a month-long rehearsal of how we will barbecue, eat, and celebrate Labor Day.

  Fourth Quarter

  My favorite holiday is Halloween, and not just because women use it as an excuse to dress like prostitutes. You ladies totally do.

  “I’m a witch.”

  If she were a hooker.

  “I’m Little Miss Muffet!”

  I’m sure you are.

  A cautionary note: Never shop with your children for their Halloween costumes online. You’re sitting there with your four-year-old daughter and google “Little Red Riding Hood costume,” and what comes up looks like it should be on the cover of an X-rated video. Not that I know what the cover of an X-rated video would look like.

  No, Halloween is my favorite because it is the ultimate candy holiday. When you’re a kid, Halloween is amazing. You dress like a superhero, you bang on your neighbor’s door, and they give you candy. I do that today, and my neighbor wants me arrested. Probably because I make such a hot Cat Woman. “Purrr! Kitty wants some candy.” Pumpkin—the only real food associated with Halloween—is purely decorative. People buy pumpkins around Halloween, but it is never to eat them. When someone wants pumpkin bread or muffins or a pumpkin pie, they go to a bakery. It is way too disgusting to try to obtain actual food out of a raw pumpkin. Who the heck gets hungry while scooping out that nasty, tangled mess? Hannibal Lecter? In our family, we always try to roast the slimy seeds, but they just turn into burnt, overly salted choking hazards that scrape your intestines for the next two weeks after eating them. We only buy the pumpkins to make jack-o’-lanterns. “Let’s carve this healthy food up into a scary face and let it rot while we eat some candy.”

  Thanksgiving is uniquely an American holiday. Sure, Canadians have a Thanksgiving, but I think they have theirs in October or something. Weirdos. I don’t think they even have a Fourth of July. Thanksgiving is intended to be about gratitude. A day of gratitude. Thank God there is a day for us to focus on being grateful because I’d hate the idea of having to be grateful year-round. We express this gratitude by overconsuming turkey, an enormous assortment of side dishes, and, of course, pies. There is very little complexity in the concept of the Thanksgiving holiday. It seems as if very little effort went into the planning.

  “How about at Thanksgiving we just eat a lot?”

  “But in America we do that every day!”

  “Well, what if we eat a lot with people who annoy the hell out of us?”

  Thanksgiving is all about overeating. Even one of the main dishes is actually called “stuffing.” Stuffing? What names did they tu
rn down? “Cram It In”? “Eat Till You Can’t Breathe”? In some parts of the country, people call stuffing “dressing.” Actually, the term stuffing makes a lot more sense than “dressing,” which normally refers to something done externally rather than internally. By calling it dressing instead of stuffing, it almost seems as if they are purposely hiding the location where this dish is actually cooked. It’s borderline dishonest. “Here’s your ‘dressing’ (wink).” Admittedly, I’m not completely comfortable with the fact that stuffing (or dressing) is, in reality, cooked inside a dead animal. I’m not sure how this is supposed to be appetizing. We are basically shoving a loaf of bread up the carcass of a turkey. This is a rather humiliating thing to do to anything after it dies. Talk about an outrage of personal dignity. I hope the turkeys never find out about this practice of “stuffing.”

  TURKEY: You guys are going to kill me?

  HUMAN: Oh, it’s going to get a lot worse.

  The Thanksgiving meal represents the opening day of the holiday season, and it is a very unprofessional season at that. Santa may be watching, but nobody is being good in December. Christmas is the Las Vegas of holiday eating. From the moment December begins, you get a free pass to overindulge. There’s even candy in Advent calendars. Regardless of your faith or belief system, all Americans find themselves invited to a never-ending buffet of holiday parties. All dietary rules are suspended. You navigate your way through each day facing an onslaught of hors d’oeuvres, the French phrase for “trays of fattening stuff no one can identify.” Cookies, cakes, and candies are exchanged with friends for virtually no reason at all. During December we are all ingesting, imbibing, and spending with a reckless abandon like a bachelor party on a guilt-free boondoggle. Everyone has the unspoken agreement that what happens in December stays in December.