Sherwood concludes that much of the appeal of Guinness Record holders is the fact that they can be “folks like you and me.” In this case it is the food itself that is “folks”: who in America does not see apple pie as the wholesome, ordinary, classless foodstuff that deserves to be elevated to gigantic status? What Scottish heart would not glow at the record-breaking attempt by his good friend the haggis? There is a reason these are called “comfort foods,” and in giant food endeavors, they take the place of the quirky guy on your block pogo sticking or spinning a yo-yo on his front porch.
Giant food goes beyond Sherwood’s criteria and has two more important dynamics that set it apart and help make it an increasingly popular sector among both readers and record setters. In many cases these records become matters of national or cultural pride, making them more emotionally important than their humanistic counterparts. For instance, sausage records are fought over by various cultures with sausage-making histories, while new entries often include national dishes, such as a unique form of pastry widely consumed in a sole South American country. While an Australian wresting an individual record in plate spinning or juggling away from an Italian might not raise many eyebrows, it is hard to imagine Italians not becoming irritated when the Aussies stole the world’s biggest risotto title away from the dish’s homeland in 2004, and did so in convincingly emphatic fashion.
More than in any other category, giant food has taken on a corporate component. Who but mammoth chocolate conglomerate Hershey Foods is in the best position to manufacture the world’s largest Hershey’s Kiss? One could logically assume that even if a competitor tried to use its own chocolate factory, trademarks alone would prevent anyone but Hershey from setting this record, which they did—more than once. Likewise, companies like Coca-Cola and Snapple have gotten into the Guinness World Records big food game, always for promotional value, bringing deep pockets and enormous production capabilities to the table, as it were. In fact, giant food records today are rarely set by individuals (as most other types of human records are) and instead are almost always held by a food company, restaurant, hotel, charity, or country with something to prove and something to sell. The first thing one realizes when pondering some of these records is that the cakes, pizzas, or bowls of strawberries exceed the scope of any oven, pan, or bowl any regular person might have in the kitchen. It is easy to see why someone contemplating the world’s largest ice cream cake might look into the existing record and switch gears, deciding that the record of thirty hours of brick carrying is, in fact, more vulnerable. Fittingly, the world’s largest ice cream cake was made in the world’s largest country, when chefs in Beijing rolled out an eight-ton monstrosity the size of a small swimming pool, standing more than 3' high and measuring 15'8" x 9'10" containing nearly 500 cubic feet of frozen desert. Whose freezer is that going in? Giant food records more often than not require the custom fabrication of everything from pots to burners, not to mention enormous quantities of ingredients, the costs of which can easily run into the thousands, or tens of thousands, of dollars.
Where, for instance, is the average Scottish home cook who decides to assault the haggis record going to lay her hands on more than eighty ox stomachs? To date, the largest haggis on record was assembled by a team of chefs at the Glasgow Hilton Hotel on May 24, 1993. According to the Glasgow Herald, it required those eighty such stomachs and weighed in at 667 pounds. When the book calls these records “Big Food,” they really mean it. In taking on Italy’s largest risotto record, which stood at 440 kilograms (just under 1,000 lbs.), the Australians left no room for doubt. More than 3,000 pounds of Arborio rice went into the pot, along with 660 pounds of cheese, nearly a ton of peas, over 1,100 gallons of vegetable stock, 20-plus gallons of olive oil, almost 50 pounds of crushed garlic, 1,000 pounds of diced onion and celery, and more than 700 pounds of butter (unsalted). The final touch was about 3 pounds of saffron, notable in its own right in the 1972 Guinness World Records as the most expensive spice. The result, which stood above not only Italy’s risotto but every other rice-based dish on earth, a double record setter, clocked in at a massive 16,522 pounds—more than sixteen times the previous record—and more than three 2008 Chevrolet Suburban SUVs stacked together. The record-setting attempt, done on Sydney’s harborfront Circular Quay on November 26, 2004, was organized by the Australian Rice Industry to raise money to combat world hunger. About 4,000 spectators sampled the dish—not even putting a dent in it—in exchange for a donation to Care Australia. The ingredients were donated by food manufacturers and suppliers, and the attempt required a custom-made pan with a seventy-foot circumference.
“At first, it sounds like a simple exercise: make a bowl of soup to beat the current record—a 5,045-litre [1,332-gallon] goulash from Romania. But contemplating just the cooking vessel is a task in itself—where does one find a cooking pot and stove sufficiently large to house enough soup to fill around seventy bath tubs? Let alone the problem of finding the ingredients for the chosen recipe, a chili-beef soup called caldillo,” wrote current Guinness World Records editor Craig Glenday in his July 2007 online blog about traveling to witness record events, in which he visited the city of Durango, Mexico, to witness soup history in the making.
The project pulled together the resources of the entire region. A month was spent planning and building the bowl—a UFO-like steel contraption that served as both container and gas cooker; local farmers provided the produce; restaurants put aside their competitive grudges and offered up their chefs; countless volunteers acted as security, servers and cleaners; and local schools put on a day-long variety show. In the end, everyone pulled it off and created one enormous caldillo measuring 5,350 litres [1,413 gallons]. The municipal president Jorge Herrera Delgado joined me in taking the first sip—after the thumbs-up from the local health authority advisor on hand to oversee proceedings, of course—and received the official Guinness World Records certificate in front of a queue of thousands desperate to sample the world-beating dish.
While the book has shown a remarkable cultural diversity in its giant foods, from the huge bowl of caldillo to the Indian onion bhaji, the English meat pie, and all-American dishes like apple pie and hot dogs, one giant food that gets little respect is the burrito. That’s what the staff of a Taco Bell restaurant in Tennessee found after making a 444-foot-long version that David Boehm (then publisher of the American edition, which included some homegrown records separate from the English version of the book) turned down. Boehm’s motive was apparently the lack of universal appeal, something pizza has but burritos don’t, at least they didn’t in 1988. “We get a call every week for another burrito record,” Mr. Boehm said from his New York office. “People in California think burritos are sold everywhere. In New York people haven’t heard about burritos.” Colossal culinary constructors take note: the book is as fickle and unpredictable about Big Food as any of its other record categories.
One thing that makes these records extra difficult is the rule that the big food products actually be edible. Guinness World Records officials sometimes even require record breakers to be certified as such by health inspectors. Of course, they don’t have to be edible by humans, at least not if the giant food in question is aimed at dogs. That was the case in 2007 when the Lions Club in Lunenburg, Massachusetts, made the world’s largest dog biscuit, at 379 pounds. It was baked using a propane grave thawer on loan from the local cemetery, and removed from the makeshift oven with a forklift (interestingly, the previous dog biscuit record, at just 159 pounds, while small by giant food standards, was held by a true giant, Microsoft Corporation). The biscuit still had to be canine edible under Guinness rules, and participants in the charity event fed pieces to their dogs. Because of such rules, even accomplished chefs can be surprised by the work that goes into a world-record dish. Chef Terrance Brennan is the owner of two highly regarded New York City restaurants, Picholine, and Artisanal Bistro and Wine Bar, both of which have an emphasis on fine cheeses. “At my restaurant Artisanal, w
e’re known for fondue, and about two years ago I thought, ‘wouldn’t it be great to make the world’s largest fondue?’ Last year I was too busy with other stuff, so this year (2006) I said ‘this is the year we’re going to do it.’ When you think of ‘world record,’ the Guinness word comes to mind. I had read the book as a kid, and subconsciously, when you think of records you think of the book. If you are going to set a record, it’s got to be the Guinness World Record.”
When Brennan started looking into it, the project immediately became more difficult than he had imagined, despite the fact that there was no existing record for fondue, making it easier, at least on paper. True to form, Brennan imagined his undertaking as a charity fundraiser, but the first obstacle was the city’s health laws. “I wanted to do it initially in Central Park and have people come pay $2 a portion or something, but it was hard,” due to regulations about selling food. Brennan is a frequent celebrity chef guest on the Today Show, and his contacts at the network soon got interested in his plans. “Then NBC got a hold of it and wanted an exclusive, and I thought it was a good partnership. They already had a relationship with the Guinness Book of World Records, so as long as I could make it a benefit rather than just about the record, NBC was on board.” Brennan continued, “I filled out the paperwork, but NBC had the contacts and had done stuff with Guinness before, and they handled everything. I just thought a ton was a nice round number, so I said, ‘okay let’s do a ton of fondue.’ It was a new record and they said yes.”
Brennan started testing adaptations of his fondue recipe for much larger quantities, because melting cheese is a fickle science and he was worried, “because at some point is it going to seize. Will it stay smooth? So we figured out how much water we needed and how to make a slurry to melt the cheese so it stayed smooth.” But the biggest challenge was neither the recipe nor the ingredients, all of which were donated, but rather a fondue pot big enough for a recipe exceeding 2,000 pounds. “I called a good friend who has a food company outside of New Orleans who could help and he thought this was great. He found me a 200-year-old cast iron vessel for making sugar, from an old sugarcane plantation. First he had to sandblast it and clean it up, but then it turned out to have a crack in it, so he had to find another one like it and start over. Then he had his team build a metal frame around it that would hold it over six propane burners, which we had to fabricate. We filled it with water to measure it and the vessel held 500 gallons. It was eight feet across and nearly a yard deep and it weighed 4,000 pounds, empty. We just did our fondue three-quarters of the way up, so if anyone breaks the record we can come back and top it.”
People who witness Ashrita Furman walking loops around the high school track he trains on near his house, sometimes through the night, balancing things on his head or carrying a brick or doing forward rolls, think he is crazy. But what about scouring the South for two huge antique pots that need to be sandblasted and required a custom stove, all for a Guinness-sized fondue? Getting the pot finished was only half the challenge. It still needed to be delivered and set up outside the studio of the Today Show at Rockefeller Center. The two-ton pot, and all its associated burners, framework, and gas had to be loaded onto a truck and driven from New Orleans to New York; to make matters even more complicated, the cargo was classified as hazardous because of its flammable potential. “With all the security now, since 9/11, they were driving up from Louisiana with these six huge propane tanks. We had told them that they had to take it over the top level of the George Washington Bridge, because we had done all the research and found that was the only way to legally get it into Manhattan, but apparently that communication never got to the truck driver. So they get to the Holland Tunnel and the police were really pissed off and they almost got arrested. They told them ‘if you can turn around without backing up we won’t arrest you,’ and turned them away. Then they tried the Midtown Tunnel, and they were nicer but still got turned away. They ended up getting through the Lincoln Tunnel.”
The fondue attempt also required a special permit from the New York City Fire Department, which had to have a fire truck on hand. With everything apparently in order for the attempt, Brennan was stunned when the Today Show called him the day before his attempt to cancel, because a producer was out sick.
We had a regular fondue segment with some recipes planned as well as the record, so they probably just didn’t get the gist of it, that we were going for this Guinness record, that we had driven this big vessel up for two days from Louisiana, that someone from Guinness was going to be there, that City Harvest was there to distribute the food to homeless shelters, that the fire department was all lined up, and that we had gotten a permit and they had to have a fire truck there. I said “this has just got to work out, we can’t cancel, we had three months of planning.” So I called the executive producer I knew and then it was on again. Then it got cancelled again because the fire permit had already been cancelled and they said we couldn’t get another one in time. We called everyone we knew who was connected and ended up getting the fire department on board again at the eleventh hour. We got there at 5 AM, got it cranked up, and the actual cooking time was probably about three hours. We gave away all the cheese to City Harvest. We pumped it back out of the kettle into five-gallon white plastic tubs and their chefs took them around to shelters in all five boroughs and used it to make macaroni and cheese, soups, pasta dishes, various things. Our donated fondue fed 5,000 people.
Guinness World Records sent a spokeswoman to the event, and as Today Show talent sampled the fondue, which Brennan stirred with three-foot-long French baguettes, she confirmed the new record for the cameras and handed over a preprinted certificate, another perk of being as well-connected as the Today Show (typical record breakers have to wait weeks or months for formal approval and their copy by snail mail). Speaking to the television audience, she said with flair, “On behalf of Guinness World Records we’d like to present this record,” and handed the chef his certificate. While Brennan was very happy with the effort and its outcome, he quickly conceded that he has no additional giant food records in sight. As with the majority of Guinness undertakings, food or no food, the reality proves much more difficult than the illusion. For the record, his fondue recipe was:
1,900 pounds Gruyère cheese
105 gallons white wine
2 ½ gallons lemon juice
5 gallons garlic juice 21 pounds kosher salt
44 ½ pounds corn starch
½ pound nutmeg
¾ pound black pepper
Even with donated cheese, chefs like Brennan have to dig deep, and often into their own pockets, to fund giant food records, which may explain the recent spate of attempts by some of the largest and wealthiest companies in the food and drink industry, which are much better positioned to pull off these promotional records. This trend began a decade ago when Coca-Cola set the Guinness World Record for the largest ice cream float, and to no one’s surprise, decided to forego the traditional root beer for one of the company’s own cola products. To mark the relaunch of its Vanilla Coke last year, Coca-Cola went back to the well, breaking its own record, even as Guinness spokesman Derek Musso told the Associated Press that he was not aware of any attempts by anyone else to top the former float record in the intervening nine-plus years. Musso confirmed that the new 3,000-gallon float, made of Vanilla Coke and ice cream, weighing ten tons, had set the new world record. Once again proving that most giant food records are like stuntman-aided car commercials and bear the caveat “don’t try this at home,” Coca-Cola dispatched a tanker from its syrup plant, and then pumped the flat syrup into a custom-made fifteen-foot-high soda glass, complete with a device that produced carbon dioxide and carbonated the beverage in the glass. Workers then dropped in buckets full of ice cream by hand. Instead of serving the several hundred witnesses, the ten-ton drink was tossed in the garbage while Coca-Cola gave out smaller ice cream float samples from a kiosk, presumably for health code reasons.
Just as Jackie “th
e Texas Snakeman” Bibby keeps his record-breaking attempts for holding live rattlesnakes in his mouth well clear of his maximum human potential so that he can easily continue to rebreak his own record as needed, companies like Coca-Cola and Hershey have found that they can carve out their own niches by repeatedly making increasingly bigger versions of the same things. Just four years after Hershey Foods Corp. fashioned the world’s “Largest Chocolate Candy,” they quintupled the size of their effort. The 2003 record breaker was a Hershey’s Rich Dark Kiss standing just over six feet tall and weighing 6,759 pounds. Aided by pastry chefs from the French Culinary Institute, Hershey scientists and engineers built a pyramid of ten-pound chocolate blocks, stuck together with liquefied molten chocolate, and after cooling, this mass was sculpted into the traditional shape of a Hershey’s Kiss, albeit almost 700,000 times its normal size. The Kiss was put on display at Chocolate World, a popular attraction cum museum in Hershey, Pennsylvania. July 7, 2007, was the 100th birthday of the iconic Kiss, and to celebrate, Hershey’s team once again broke out the bulk chocolate, and this time crafted a twelve-foot Kiss, tipping the scales at 30,540 pounds, more than fifteen tons, and earning the similar but slightly different Guinness World Records title of “World’s Largest Piece of Chocolate.” The life-size chocolate dinosaur couldn’t have been happy about having his record driven to extinction.
Getting into Guinness Page 19