Happy Halloween! Your child is fat

By Dan Brooks in Etiquette 4 Comments
He is also probably gay.

He is also probably gay.

It’s Halloween, and instead of candy, a person the Atlantic describes as “an outspoken woman in North Dakota” plans to give overweight trick-or-treaters notes for their parents explaining that they are fat. Not the parents—the kids are fat in this scenario, although it’s likely that everyone in their family has similar eating habits, and the kid probably only went as a pumpkin/Jabba the Hutt/Honda Civic because a combination of genetics and environment have made him obese at an age when he has almost zero control over his daily routine or health. But fuck that. Your kid is fat. You sent him out for candy, and he came home with shame. Also probably a lot of candy, since not everyone in North Dakota is a relentless bitch.

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Understand the fundamental dilemma of the United States through addictive food

By Dan Brooks in obesity 5 Comments
A scamp

A scamp

When Hostess went out of business, I immediately faced the prospect of not eating a Ho-Ho ever again. I am familiar with Swiss Cake Rolls; it’s possible I ate an entire box of them this weekend, but they are not Ho-Hos. It’s not even that I like a Ho-Ho so much. It has that flavor and that texture, though, both of which lie between chocolate and wax. A Ho-Ho is not good so much as it is particular, and the idea of never having another one makes me appreciate the alcoholic’s principle of One Day at a Time. In short, I am addicted, like the American food executives in Michael Moss’s million-page exposé want me to be.

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Should I eat it? KFC’s new Double Down sandwich

By Dan Brooks in consumerism 11 Comments

When KFC announced its new KFC Double Down sandwich on April 1st, we thought it was a joke. I use “we,” here, in the sense of “We would not like to watch Tyler Perry’s House of Pain,” or “We thank you for the prize package, but we’re just going to go ahead and sell the Segway,”—that is, in the sense of we who do not weigh 300 pounds. Frankly, we are not sure that thing is even a sandwich. The generic hallmark of the sandwich is bread, and the absence of bread is of course the Double Down’s claim to fame. Where the bland, ambitionless Whopper wastes your time with a bun, the Double Down puts bacon, cheese, and something called Colonel’s Sauce between two pieces of fried chicken. Which is great news for anyone who A) has a gluten allergy or B) wants their food to look like it’s eating food.

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Hopefully the last time we will discuss Kevin Smith

By Dan Brooks in obesity 8 Comments

Why are you so similar to Haley Joel Osment? Dammit.

I loved Clerks and Mallrats when I was in high school, which makes thinking about Kevin Smith now particularly uncomfortable, like thinking about a bad ex-girlfriend. “How did I once love this person?” one asks, and the answer casts unsettling aspersions on the very notion of a self. It’s possible I’m overthinking this. My point is that Kevin Smith once seemed awesome and is now—for that reason and also because he made this and, Jesus, this—embarrassing. He is proof that anyone with enough gumption and perseverance can rise from obscurity to become a Hollywood hack, and that the things we love occasionally turn out to be, in retrospect, pretty awful—not that they remain wholly without merit. Also, I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but he’s really fat now.

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Fat acceptance raises some big issues, which sit next to you on the plane

By Dan Brooks in consumerism, counterculture, health care, health insurance reform, oppositional culture, widespread dumbening 9 Comments

Ronald McDonaldThe enormous pink jacket industry received a windfall this week, as representatives from the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance lobbied Congress for a public health care option that would not consider excess weight a pre-existing condition. It turns out that when a bill is going around the House, it really goes around the House. Hey-o! Seriously, though, there really is a fat acceptance community, and according to the New York Times, they really do think that fat people are being unfairly scapegoated in the national debate over health care reform. Certainly, there’s no question that fat people get used as scapegoats. Every time a diving board breaks or one end of a park bench shoots straight up in the air, we look around for the fat person. The question is whether this scapegoating is unfair.

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