I Couldn't Help But Hunger...

Last night, I opted out of seeing Iron Man 2 in favor of baking a triple layer chocolate cake. I ran out of eggs and substituted yogurt (which is about as smart as trying to replace palladium with platinum in an arc reactor).


Anyway, somewhere between phoning up neighbors to beg for eggs and defeatedly dumping a container of non-fat Dannon into the Cuisinart, I turned on Entertainment Tonight. Mary Hart (a former Miss South Dakota) was introducing a segment about Donna Simpson, the 600 pound New Jersey woman with the personal goal of gaining an additional 400 pounds by consuming 12,000 calories a day. Donna Simpson is currently the world's Fattest Mother, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. She even has her own website, where people can pay to watch her hoover food. (She not only eats lying down in bed, but wearing lingerie.) While I was guiltily licking butter and sugar off of a small corner of a small spatula, Donna's husband, son, and daughter were preparing her a special pre-Mother's Day breakfast of 8 sausage patties, 4 pieces of toast, and a 10-egg omelet. I have to be honest here. My first reaction was anger -- anger that I had run out of eggs, and that Donna was throwing back a dozen.

What weighs 1000 pounds: the dog and cat food Kei$ha just donated to the Nashville Metro County Animal Shelter. Two adult black bears. Fifty regulation aluminum scuba tanks (full). 1,515 plastic fast food trays.

And yet, there's this: I ate my own way into the Guinness Book of World Records. A few weeks ago, in honor of Augustana's 150th Anniversary, I lined up on a football field with 2,693 other eaters to set a new World Record for most number of people in a chain licking ice cream simultaneously. It was a fire hazard. It involved standing around for hours on the buggy 30 yard line at dinnertime holding peanut butter-fudge-oreo ice cream you were forbidden to eat until the official signal. It involved group cheers of the "Give-Me-a!" variety and The Wave. It involved turning to your left, bending down, and tonguing a stranger's scoop for a full minute. In short: it was dumb, but we were making history.



What is it about the Guinness Book of World Records that compels a grown man to retype The Life of Abraham Lincoln working backwards from the last sentence (there are 956 pages), or Swiss chefs to make a 1,724 pound tiramisu? What is the allure of baking an even bigger tiramisu (with 661 pounds of mascarpone -- roughly the current size of Donna Simpson) and storing it in an ice rink? Maybe we all need to be the best at something, even if that something is inane or deleterious. This desire to achieve singular success is on the rise with obesity. We've upped the ante on shock value -- underage Miley Cyrus in a bird cage, Lucky Rich with his 100% tattooed body -- so that memorable is inseparable from ample. Go bigger, bolder. (Soon I will write about my friend Isaac's Red Lobster documentary, "Endless Shrimp," a cinematic musing on American excess. I managed to eat six plates of scampi on camera and didn't throw up once! Even though I promised him I would.)

Still. There's a wide divide between a 400 pound weight gain and licking ice cream en masse. I try to teach my students empathy, but how can anyone walk in Donna Simpson's shoes when she can't even walk in them herself? If I sit with my empathy, it grows vexed and demands the phone number for child protective services. (Clearly, a morbidly obese woman actively taking steps to further balloon is not just inflicting harm on herself, but on her family.) But then I do feel sorry for Donna Simpson -- sorry that she is conflating deep emotional issues with positive body image. Sorry that no regulatory agency has pulled the plug on her website, or at least helped her copyedit it (she lists "being feed" as an interest). I want to call her up and suggest other things to be the best at. Losing weight, for one. Or designing a containment dome for an oil spill. Or ridding school lunch food of sodium benzoate. Or simply taking her health seriously.