I can’t stop eating. I won’t stop eating. You can’t make me stop eating.
When I’m eating with other people and reach the end of the meal, it’s totally an act. I don’t get full. I stop eating only when I can tell that it would be socially unacceptable to keep going. I see people who stop eating when there’s still food on their plate and I can only imagine they have something really wrong with them.
I may have a tapeworm. If I find out that I do, I won’t have him removed, I’ll give him a nickname and call him my friend.
If I’m at a party and there’s food out, I lose my mind. If there’s a bowl of chips, it’s mine. If I see cheese and crackers, you better keep your hands clear or you will get bit. Don’t expect me to carry on a conversation when there’s a platter of anything around, I simply can’t concentrate. Not until my wife drags me into the other room, throws a pitcher of water in my face, and slaps me around.
If we’re ever out to dinner together and the waiter asks, “Would you like anything else?” and I say, “No,” I’m lying. The real me, the honest me, would always say through a mouth full of something, “Yes, more of everything.”
I love food in such a deep, profound way that I’m salivating just writing about it.
There are sandwiches from my past that I carry with me as if they were memories of lovers. “The Italian Special” from Casa Del Sole in Hillsdale, New Jersey. “The Spicy Dom” at Domingo’s in Encino, California. “The Michelangelo” from Alidoro on Sullivan Street in New York City.
How did this happen to me? How did I become a fine-food piranha? It’s nature and nurture and cheese. The nature is that I come from an Italian family. The nurture is that my Italian family taught me to eat every meal as if it would be my last. And cheese, well, what more can I say?
Italians use food as sport, religion, a career, therapy, and a nonstop celebration.
They are constantly thinking about food, going to get the food, making the food, and feeding everybody the food. Whenever we’re eating, all anybody talks about is what we’re eating next. Italians truly love life, but that’s only because staying alive means they can eat more food.
My childhood was filled with lasagna, meat sauce, and family who kissed me with cannoli on their lips. When we drove to my grandmother’s house on Sundays, the smell of garlic and provolone would roll out of her kitchen and open the car door for us. It would take me by the arm and escort me inside, where she would be making a five-course meal out of one can of crushed tomatoes.
There was very little money but a lot of people to feed. I’m one of twenty-three grandchildren and we were all there, at the same time, leaving her no choice but to perform a miracle out of her tiny kitchen each week.
Today people do much less with much more. Modern kitchens with marble islands, industrial-strength ovens, double freezers, and built-in refrigerators, and no one cooks! Millions of dollars just so they can heat things up. All she had was her small oven and very little counter space, but with the help of the grandchildren learning by her side while washing the pots and pans, it hummed like a fine restaurant.
The dining room was a converted porch where the family ate at a long table, always covered in a crisp white tablecloth. Three generations, united by her cooking, listening, loving, and eating. There seemed to be endless bowls of spaghetti and meatballs, marinated olives, and garlic bread. Chicken Parmesan, homemade ravioli, and gnocchi in heavy cream sauce.
The adults drank wine and snuck it to the children. They would never give it to their own kids but would sneak it to their nieces and nephews, which meant that eventually everyone got some.
I was ten years old, drunk on wine, and covered in sauce. You don’t live this way and learn to eat like this without developing a nice, healthy food addiction.
My father and I took it one step further by joining forces in taking on eating challenges. He would take me to White Castle, a dingy fast-food joint that makes Taco Bell seem like dining at the Ritz-Carlton. They’re still around and continue to serve the very same square burgers in little cardboard sleeves. You slide them out of the packaging and eat each one in about two bites. At twenty-seven cents apiece we would get sacks of burgers and sit in the car with the cartons spread all around us steaming up the windows. We’d plow through fifty of those suckers without a problem.
My father was always on the lookout for food challenges where he knew we would more than get our money’s worth. He’d heard about an all-you-can-eat sushi place, in Hackensack, New Jersey. This was in the 1980s, when sushi wasn’t very well known and the offer was their way to get sheltered people from New Jersey to pay attention to this exotic Asian cuisine.
It was a terrible business decision on their part. We plowed through trays of this stuff as fast as they could roll it. My father felt speed was important because he always feared it was just a matter of time before they realized their mistake and changed the rules.
“You’re taking too many bites,” he’d say. “One bite, swallow. One bite, swallow.”
We ate in a panic while the staff stared at us from the kitchen in disbelief.
There are restaurants all around the metropolitan area with our names engraved on the walls in honor of the damage we did. One was an old roadhouse in northern New Jersey, called Joe McDonald’s Steakhouse, that had a hard-to-beat steak challenge. It was famous for all the World War II memorabilia that covered every inch of the place. Large men ate large cuts of meat surrounded by thousands of guns, uniforms, and war bond posters.
I loved this place and had been going with my family since I was a little kid, but when I was sixteen they came up with the McDonald’s Steak Challenge. If you ate a seventy-two-ounce steak in one sitting, with the sides, you got your name on the wall and a T-shirt with the picture of a cow on it. Despite the hefty carnivores who ate there, not many had won. We wanted to win. We wanted to be on the wall, but even more we wanted the T-shirt. My father would have seen it as a great insult if someone else in town was walking around in that shirt thinking they could eat more than us.
The waitress served the giant dishes with a side dish of disgust.
“You’re going to make yourself sick,” she said.
“Don’t listen to her, Tom, she’s trying to mess with your head,” my father said.
It was the biggest steak I had ever seen. I quickly understood why there weren’t more people with their name engraved on the wall between the hand grenades and bayonets. Eating the steak alone was impossible. Eating the sides as well, insane.
We finished it in five minutes.
“Look, we’re even eating the skin,” I told the waitress while holding up a potato. She shook her head and handed in her apron.
We are on that wall. I lost the T-shirt.
When I was in college there was the Gaetano’s Cheesesteak Challenge. The upperclassmen told us tales of these gigantic sandwiches that were so big they came in beer case boxes. They told us, “No one has ever eaten a whole one. It’s impossible.”
I quietly smiled to myself.
We drove an hour to the shop and placed our orders. There were no tables, so we all stood around the hood of our car with our sandwiches laid out before us. They were enormous, way too much food for one person. Everyone grew quiet as they struggled to chew. I dabbed the corner of my mouth with a napkin and before anyone was halfway done said, “I’m going for another one, anyone want anything?”
One of my friends passed out. I ate two.
I could be so fat. I’m a little overweight. I’d say happily overweight. Not health problem overweight, but technically, according to my doctor, I could lose a few. I actually got in shape for a physical recently, and while my doctor was proud of my progress, he told me, “Keep it up, only twenty more pounds to go.”
There’s no way I’m doing it. I don’t think it’s possible. My metabolism is so slow that in order to lose that weight I would literally have to stop eating altogether. If I starve, I’ll maintain the weight I am, yet if I eat one M&M, I’ll double in size.
And here’s the real reason why I won’t take my doctor’s advice: I love eating too much. Eating is my life. There’s too much happiness and history to put an end to it. I tried to clean up my diet and become a vegetarian. I lasted a while but eventually broke, not for any other reason than that I walked into an Italian deli. All the joyful smells of my entire life wrapped around me, and before I knew it I was walking out the door with boxes filled with cheeses, breads, and prosciutto. I had to steer with one hand because I had a meatball sandwich in the other.
I know I’m not alone in this food passion. It’s not as if Italians make up the entire population of the United States. The South is covered in fried chicken, okra, and barbecue. The Southwest is steeped in Mexican heritage. Chinatown is a part of every city. New England raised entire generations on lobster rolls. I was touring in the Upper Midwest in early fall and it was as if someone broke open a bakery case and doughnuts, pies, and maple syrup spilled all the way up to Canada. Wisconsin is literally made out of cheese curds.
It’s really our duty to eat and enjoy ourselves. Who cares if you’re a little fat? We’re all fat. You’re either really fat, kind of fat, or trying not to be fat. Either way, fat’s coming.
So enjoy yourself. More wine! More bread! More cheese! Do it for you. Do it for your ancestors. Do it for me.