One French silk pie. Twelve minutes. One trip to Perkins that didn't need to happen. One bet that finished with its only viable outcome. That pretty much sums up my weekend.
On Saturday I ended up in the central Wisconsin outpost of Marshfield, where I met up with some friends and cruised the strip, looking for a place to satisfy our hunger at 10 p.m. Because the city had all but shut down an hour ago, the only outlets open were all-night eateries.
With 10 people present, it seemed like conversation alone couldn't carry the night. I figured I had to return to form and consume mass quantities for fun and profit (another guy was picking up the tab). The breakfast dishes were too easy and none of the dinner entre??s provided sufficient grease or grimaces to pose a challenge. The dessert menu offered my salvation-or, more truthfully, my near-demise.
If you want to show your stomach how much you hate it, eat one French silk pie as quickly as possible. With a blazing fork and just enough momentum to sustain me, I dug in. The creamy center is deeper and bigger when you realize that one piece is just an eighth of the way to the end. Fortunately, the strategy of eating the filler and then moving on to the crust works better than it tastes.
Of course, I should say it works only as well as its context allows it.
When the crust loomed bigger than a stretched-out hand, only the persistence of a veteran of greedy eating and the doubts of a naysayer could get me through. A dozen minutes from starting, I took down the final wedge and let myself gurgle away in dismal discomfort tinged by stupid triumph.
I've been pulling off similar feats for quite some time. My history of gluttony is long and shameful, adding up to more meals than memories because I can usually fit three or even four of them into one sitting. It's been happening since grade school and it looks like I'm pegged as \the guy who eats.""
Flash back to St. Anthony's Catholic School and you'll see me as a fifth grader taking on Jason Schreiner, a fourth-grade upstart. I'm working my way through a sixth taco while he's throwing in the towel at his fifth. With all the nuns' talk of gluttony as a deadly sin, we seem to be going to hotter places. The kids are cheering me on as I finish and realize this is probably the start of something very calorie-laden.
In high school I took my victual vacuuming to the all-night grocery stores and neighbors' basements. Some acquaintances and I would gather in a local County Market and search for the strange, the repulsive and the plentiful.
We found things in bulk and bought too much of them. Cookie dough, bullion cubes, butter sticks, fluke pops, pie filling, beans-it didn't matter as long as it wouldn't put us in the emergency room.
One time, a friend and I were trying to find the worst way to eat one of the worst foods-hot dogs. Convenience store dogs were oozing in their own cursed juices, but we ate them anyway. But we needed some manner of eating that was even more disconcerting. First we split one dog and swallowed our respective halves without chewing. Then we stared each other down and swallowed an entire hot dog apiece, whole.
The story got out and people held me to it. I've had to live up to the stories. In college, I've kept up this reputation without the option of shirking my food duties.
My colleagues and I used to run out to a Denny's on the edge of town for some after-production conversation and a sandwich called a Dagwood. The Dagwood is the titan of breakfast sandwiches, encompassing everything that's unhealthy in the first meal of the day. The Dagwood can make grown men cry with its dimensions and heinous amounts of eggs, meat and cheese. It is a trophy for those who finish and a curse for those who don't.
I can finish one in a little under three minutes. In one instance I ate two in under 10 minutes. Another time I put a country fried steak in it and downed the abomination. The Dagwood has been the standard for my collegiate fodder follies. It puts me on a pedestal for those who believe consuming thousands of calories in seconds is some sort of feat.
It's foolish, I know. But it's an obscene talent that I've developed strategies for. Whether it means putting away five raw eggs in a row or gulping down a 40-ounce steak, it seems that my mass consumption is my form of acceptable notoriety. I figure I won't be stopping any time soon, even if it means sizing up a second French silk pie in a sitting.
Ben Schultz is a senior majoring in history and English. Reprimand him for his voracious ways at blschultz@wisc.edu.
