by Adam Carolla
One last complaint about the ketchup. Everything has been super-sized except the ketchup packet. You’ve got eighty pounds of fries and a thimbleful of ketchup. Somewhere during your ninth packet, you’ve managed to moisten four fries.
JEWISH FOOD
As a people, Jews are not exactly stuntmen. Danger is not their middle name, it’s Neil. You won’t find them jumping the fountain at Caesar’s Palace, riding in dune buggies, or on the vert ramp at the X Games. But when it comes to food, they suddenly turn into Johnny Knoxville. Cow tongue, gefilte fish, pickled herring. They’re the only people who think cold gelatinized mackerel sounds good. And have you ever had a chicken-liver omelet? Of course you haven’t, you’re sane. When these guys pull up to the dinner table they should be wearing leather red-white-and-blue jumpsuits and be sponsored by Red Bull.
RAVIOLI
I never order ravioli at a restaurant because they only give you six of them. Canned ravioli is a disaster, but the flash-frozen stuff that comes in a sheet and you toss into the pot is usually decent. I’ve never had a bad outing with that ravioli. The great thing about ravioli is that there’s nothing you can put in it that’s bad. “What is this?” “It’s beef.” “Awesome.” “What is this?” “It’s cheese.” “Awesome.” “What is this?” “It’s pumpkin.” “Great.” “What is this?” “This is BBs from a shotgun shell.” “All right, I’ll try it.” “What’s this?” “It’s one of your mom’s spent tampons.” “All right, I’ll give it a shot.”
PIZZA
Pizza is a controversial topic. People will argue that the thick-crust deep-dish is the best kind. I have no problem with deep-dish. But to me the best deep-dish pizza from the best deep-dish place in Chicago doesn’t stack up against a slice of average New York–style thin crust. I’m talking about the kind you can fold like a taco and funnel the grease directly into your mouth. For most guys, pizza’s in about the same category as blow jobs. Some are better than others, but even a mediocre one is good. Unfortunately, there are those that are hell-bent on fucking up a simple food that is universally loved. Here’s how you fuck up a pizza. There’s a highfalutin way to fuck up a pizza and a NASCAR white-trash way to fuck it up.
Let’s start with the top-shelf pizzas. I’ve never had a mushroom pizza or a black olive pizza or a sausage-and-onion pizza and announced, “Something’s missing. I know what it is, it’s poached salmon.” I could eat pizza three meals a day, seven days a week, and would never grow tired of the seven or eight traditional pizza toppings and the two thousand possible variations you can create from those. What is it with our endless obsession with changing things that shouldn’t be messed with? There’s nothing less broken on this planet than pizza. Megan Fox should get a nose job and a tummy tuck before we start considering altering pizza. If you don’t like a good sausage-and-onion or Canadian-bacon-and-olive pizza, then you don’t fucking like pizza and you should get the fuck away from my pizza. You homos should spend your extra culinary effort fixing the salads you fucked up eight years ago. I would rather stand in the orchestra pit for two thousand straight showings of Puppetry of the Penis than eat a pizza with goat cheese.
Now for my blue-collar friends who enjoy inexpensive delivery pizza—Domino’s, Papa John’s, et cetera. Let’s deconstruct these shitty pizzas like it’s a gastronomic crime scene and get to the truth about why they suck. Let’s start at the top and work our way down. The toppings. I’m ashamed to say that I can’t tell the difference between Domino’s pepperoni and a high-end trattoria pepperoni. The mushrooms are essentially the same, the onions are the same, the black olives are the same. So it’s not the toppings. On to the next suspect: the cheese. I bet if I shaved you a sliver each of Mario Batali’s mozzarella and Little Caesar’s, you wouldn’t know the difference. So let’s continue our ridiculous investigation. Now we get to the sauce. I know there’s such a thing as great pizza sauce, but it still comes down to crushed-up tomato, basil, and a little garlic. Not that Pizza Hut hasn’t found a way to fuck up this amazingly simple task, but I still claim it’s not the real culprit. If this were a robbery, the sauce would merely be the wheel man who will be found shot in the van near the alley where they switched cars. Who is the Keyser Söze of this culinary crime? The dough. The crust is the kingpin. It’s bad and there’s too much of it. It’s like a band you hate coming out with a double album. It has the consistency, flavor, and girth of carpet padding. If they made their crust thinner, not only would it save them money, it would make them money because we would eat more of their pizza.
Here’s my analogy. You either want to be on the beach with the thin crust or out past the breakers with the Chicago-style thick crust. It’s in between where you get pummeled. Think about it. Who likes doughy crust? Kids. And what are kids? Tiny, dumb adults. Therefore if you are into that chewy, spongy dough, you are mentally deficient. Also, I’m no dietician, but everyone knows carbs are the worst thing you can eat. And the pizza with three times the crust is going to have three times the carbs. Domino’s thin crust is fine; if they were smart, they’d only make that. But of course they refuse to learn this lesson and come out with stuffed crust. Again, this is for morons. The point of the crust is to have a dough handle for the rest of the pie. There’s already cheese on the pizza, it doesn’t need to be in the pizza. If you want a tube of melted cheese, order the goddamn mozzarella sticks. This is also a declaration that you make a horrible pizza. It’s the culinary equivalent of pleading insanity: You know you’re not winning the case, you’re just hoping to avoid the chair. And Domino’s, Pizza Hut, and other chains, please stop trying to kill us with your dessert attempts. Two slices of your stuffed-crust Philly-cheesesteak pizza is equivalent to eating a gingerbread house. Do we really need to cram in another two thousand fudge-flavored calories?
I hate the people who love the vegetable lover’s pizza. Nobody who loves pizza wants the horn of plenty dumped onto their pie. This always gets ordered for the handful of vegetarian assholes who have to destroy everyone else’s dining experience. Someone should just order a dinner salad for those douchebags and let them eat it in the car. Or better yet, just order them a goddamn mushroom pizza. It’s not that vegetarians love vegetables, it’s that they love cows. Oh, and hate people.
Now that I’ve said my piece on pizza, let’s get into how to order it. Here’s how not to order it: “There’s thirty guys showing up for the Super Bowl party. Give me ten cheese and ten pepperoni.” I find pepperoni is tolerated but never loved. Like a chick with a pretty face and a fat ass. Guys will have sex with her, but they’d rather be with the Victoria’s Secret model. Or in this case, the sausage-and-onion or the meatball. Now that’s a pizza I’d like to have sex with. I claim the “give me ten cheese and ten pepperoni” is a vestige of our childhood when you’d go to some kid’s house for a birthday or slumber party and Mama knew that the eight-year-olds would eat anything with salt and grease she slid in front of them. This mentality gets dragged into adulthood and eventually the office place when it comes time to order pizza for the Christmas party. Here’s my ten-pizza, please-everyone ordering combo: two cheese, two pepperoni, two sausage-and-onion, two meatball, one black olive, and one mushroom. There. All bases covered, everyone’s happy, and I guarantee you the two meatballs will be gone before one of the pepperoni pies expires.
BLUEBERRY, CHOCOLATE, AND JALAPEÑO BAGELS
Another food that’s often ordered at the workplace is bagels. When it comes to ordering bagels, I’m going to need you to take everything I just taught you about pizza and throw it out the window. In the world of bagels, less is more. I feel qualified to speak about bagels because even though I’m not a Jew I do possess many Jewish qualities, such as a huge cock and an incredible vertical leap. We started off with two or three varieties of bagels and worked our way up to 175. This is why when the peon from the office returns from the bagel run you can look forward to the blueberry bagel, the jalapeño bagel, the cranberry bagel, and the chocolate bagel. By the way, we’ve
had chocolate bagels for two hundred years—they’re called fucking donuts. So instead of enough plain, onion, and egg bagels to go around, he gets a United Nations chub pack of bagels nobody wants. But here’s the problem. Eventually, because it’s free and somehow free food at the workplace turns everyone into a bear at Yellowstone Park, the cranapple and strawberry-yogurt-flavored bagels get consumed, and this sends the message to the lackey, “Nice work. Next time order the exact same thing.”
TRAIL MIX
Another office-food abortion is the trail mix. Is there anything sadder than the trail mix after it’s been sifted through? Once the raccoons in the office have picked out the M&Ms, peanuts, and smoked almonds, there’s nothing left but a busted banana chip and a couple of raw sunflower seeds. This is what you should do when you start a new business. Buy a tub of trail mix and put it out. Let all your employees sift through it. Whatever’s left at the bottom, don’t buy any more of that crap. We don’t like it. Why not just buy a thing of smoked almonds, a thing of honey-roasted peanuts, and a thing of M&Ms? Isn’t that what people want anyway? Have you ever heard somebody say, “I could really go for some of those weird round date-pellet things with the white powder on the outside”?
The other problem with trail mix is that it has the illusion of being healthy. But if you ever read the back of the bag, you’ll see a handful of this shit has more calories than a pack of Twinkies. Much like the Raisinets, I’m convinced the reason for its popularity is the name. If it were called by its real name, “I Hate 75 Percent of What’s in This Mix Mix,” they’d never sell a bag of it.
VARIETY PACKS
They talk about variety being the spice of life. Variety is not that great, especially variety packs. They sound good at first, but it’s the same as trail mix. Some stuff you like and a bunch of crap you don’t. Me and my wife were watching TV not too long ago and she was eating a lime Popsicle. I said, “Give me a hit off that.” I tasted it and thought, This tastes like ass. Lime Popsicles suck. So I asked, “Why do you like lime Popsicles? How did I marry someone who likes lime Popsicles? I hate lime Popsicles.” She replied, “I don’t like them either.” So I said, “Why are you eating a lime Popsicle if you don’t like them?” Then she said, “Well, I wanted a Popsicle and we were at the end of the variety pack.” We’d gone through all the cherry ones, all the orange ones, all the ones we like, and were left with four lime ones. So my wife was eating a Popsicle she didn’t want to eat because it came in a variety pack.
And who buys the cereal variety pack? Why not just get one regular-sized box of cereal you like instead of twelve key-chain-sized boxes, nine of which suck?
CAKE VS. PIE
Cake probably outsells pie by a margin of fifteen to one, yet pie is a superior dessert. So how does one explain this anomaly? I will explain in painstaking detail, but let’s first just set some ground rules. When I say pie is better than cake, I mean your average pie versus your average cake, because I know what many of you are thinking right now: “There’s a German bakery on the east side of town that makes a seven-layer dark chocolate with a raspberry center that is out of this world.” That cake is sixty-three dollars and requires a two-week lead time. Here’s my simple experiment. If I said, “Pie lover, I’ll give you nine dollars to purchase the pie of your choice, and cake hole, you also have nine dollars to purchase the cake of your choice,” and I put them both out at an office party, which would get eaten first? Obviously it would be the pie. Because down the street from me, as we speak, there’s a Marie Callender’s that has a huge banner that says ANY PIE, $7.99, and a smaller sign beneath it that says NEGROES EAT AT THE COUNTER. I’m assuming that’s older. Or you could take that eight dollars to the nearest supermarket and pick up a lard-frosted sheet cake, which, if you say it fast and with an Israeli accent, gives you a more apt description.
So why the disparity in sales? I believe it’s because the cake makes a better platform for candles, messages like HAPPY 25TH ANNIVERSARY, soccer fields, and SpongeBob. You can’t put a goalpost on an apple pie. How fucking retarded are we that we pick an inferior-tasting dessert based on its ability to deliver a message? Can you imagine making that argument for any other food? “Sure, the lobster tastes great, but I’m going with the SPAM because I can set an army man on it.” Why do cakes even need themes? We know it’s the kids’ fucking birthday, and the cake is the last thing that comes out—we’ve already seen the pile of presents and the pointy hats. It’s not as if they brought out a birthday pie we’d all get confused and start singing “Happy Kristallnacht.” And just like my stuffed-crust argument, when you bring out a dessert that has a detailed re-creation of the Avatar rain forest, you’re basically admitting your food sucks. And don’t get me started on this new Photoshop frosting technology. Am I the only one who thinks it’s a little bit weird to take a knife and put it across the neck of an exact representation of your seven-year-old in a Dodger uniform? (By the way, if you had one of those machines in the seventeenth century, you would rule the land. “He hath placed my image on a confection. What sorcery is this? Dismiss Michelangelo and give this man a thousand gold pieces to frost the ceiling of our greatest chapel.”)
Let’s examine the wisdom of the time-honored birthday candle. I’m no Howard Hughes, but somewhere around the third attempt to blow out the candles, the one in which the five-year-old is joined by his sister and heavyset uncle, I’m out. Once there’s more spittle than frosting, I magically become diabetic. And as long as we’re on this archaic practice, let’s talk about the novelty candle, the candle that goes out and then reignites, forcing Grandpa to dig deep and blow a hot wind of Polident and tuberculosis over the cake for yet another round. And then the same guy who washed his hands thirteen times that day immediately grabs a wedge and digs in. Would anybody do this if instead of cake, Grandpa was blowing on a pan of lasagna? Every motherfucking person in that room would be like, “Hey, Grandpa. We’re going to the Olive Garden.”
And speaking of unsanitary, how about the practice of removing all the army men and football players from their frosting foundation and licking the base? Do you think those plastic figures with the lead-based paint were transported like an organ and placed on top of the cake in the OR? Or did a fat junior-college dropout just grab them from a shoebox she keeps open under the counter and stick them on the cake in between nose rubs?
So let’s review. The reason the inferior form of dessert outsells the far superior form fifteen to one is because you can stick plastic shit on it. Goddamn, are we dumb. My final and perhaps most compelling argument for why you should serve pie at your next party instead of cake is simple. When you put out pie at a party, it attracts a crowd. You have to tell people, “We’re not going to cut into it until after dinner has been served.” With cake, there’s never a line. Some poor bitch gets put in charge of distributing it to guests around the party. Here’s how that interaction works. Someone who looks like one of your mom’s friends shows up where you’re sitting holding a small paper plate with a wedge of cake on it. “Would you like some cake?” “What kind is it?” “I think it’s vanilla.” “I’m cool.” “Are you sure? How about I just set it down on the arm of the sofa. You might change your mind.” Later on that night, that wedge of cake will be found with one finger of frosting removed and a cigarette put out in it. That has never happened with a wedge of pumpkin pie.
But a note of caution to all of my pie-toting friends. Don’t think you can head to the supermarket and get a decent pie. I don’t know if it’s the mass production or the fluorescent lighting or the MSG, but whatever it is, those pies suck. And they’re still $7.50. For another buck nineteen, you could go to a pie shop and get a real pie. And don’t get cute with the flavors. Pineapple is not a pie filling, and chocolate pie is nothing more than pudding in a pie tin. If you’re going strawberry or peach, make sure it’s in season. Now go out there and eat like champions.
THIS CHAPTER
IS NOT A HATE
CRIME
Racism is a topic we never get tired of discussing in this country. Here’s my semi-offensive take on racism.
First of all, we have to admit that there’s a certain amount of cultural pride that is inherent in all human beings. If you turn on the television and there’s a boxing match on, you will usually root for the guy who looks most like you. But if you find out that the guy who looks less like you is from your hometown, you may start rooting for him. Or if the guy who isn’t your ethnicity was pronounced dead after an incident at a public pool when he was only nine and has beaten the odds to vie for the welterweight championship. For me it doesn’t take much. If the guy who looks like Wesley Snipes is the underdog and the guy who looks like Greg Brady is unbeaten (I know that’s never going to happen), I’ll be rooting for the black guy. Because I always root for the underdog. All things being equal, every bit of history aside, people are going to root for the person who looks most like them. I don’t think I’m different from anyone else who’s being honest. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, I’m just saying it’s built into all of us and we should just accept it.
OUR “RACIST” CULTURE
The left would like us to believe we’re living in a racist culture. Well, the highest-paid person on TV, Oprah, is black and possibly even female. The highest-paid movie star is Will Smith. The highest-paid singer is Beyoncé. The highest-paid athlete, pre-divorce, is Tiger Woods. And of course the guy who leads the country these people all live in is black. Permit me to go Dr. Seuss on your asses for just one moment. What if there was a planet where 90 percent of the population were white Sneetches and 10 percent of the planet were black Sneetches. But the highest-paid performers and athletes (and I don’t just mean for what they do on the field, I’m also talking about endorsements) and the leader of all the Sneetches, as voted on by the entire Sneetch population, were black Sneetches. And what if I went on to tell you how racist the white Sneetches were. Wouldn’t you stop and say that doesn’t make sense? How racist could they be?