You know how it’s always fun to make light of your own shortcomings until someone else points out that you really are an obnoxious, party-ruining alcoholic? Oh, you don’t know what that’s like? Well the German magazine Der Spiegel will show you what it’s like. And those Prussian bastards are pointing and laughing at your Hardees jowls and highly-exposed butt crack.
This article, which was translated from the original German (like all good literature), was published last weekend on Der Spiegel’s International Edition website. Ostensibly the piece was about Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s War on Big Ass Sodas, but it ended up just being a hilarious mash-up of cliches about how fat we are as a nation.
The best parts of the article almost all take place in Evansville, Indiana — which was somehow determined to be “America’s Most Obese City.”
Although it’s a very serious issue, and one that government authorities have dubbed an epidemic, it’s hard to not chuckle a bit over some aspects of the matter. For example, when some Evansville residents wanted to break the world record for collective pushups, only 165 people showed up, instead of the required 251, out of a population of 120,000.
The reporter, a certain Ullrich Fichtner, obviously was mad at his bosses for sending him to Indiana in the middle of Summer.
The fitness video “Go, you chicken fat, go,” filmed at Bob’s Gym and published on the mayor’s YouTube channel, received 3,400 clicks, equal to about 3 percent of the city’s population. Winnecke says that there are 65 small and large parks in the city, “plenty of space for all kinds of activities.” But when you look around in Evansville, you don’t see much physical activity going on, except in the evening along the banks of the Ohio, where the homeless get drunk, and during the day at the main bus station, where a lot of very fat people sit in the waiting room drinking sugar-saturated drinks from cups the size of flower pots.
Can you even imagine being homeless in Indiana? This blows my mind. If I were homeless in Indiana I would be on the first Megabus to somewhere warm and scenic with lots of tourists to annoy beg from. Why don’t they all just go to Miami or San Diego? It’s not like they have houses they can’t sell in this real estate market.
Anyway, next our German friend describes the urban geography of Real America.
Shopping malls surround the city like the camps of a besieging army. The malls, connected by multiple-lane highways, are the focal points of public activity. The obesity epidemic is in full view at the large Eastland Mall on Green River Road, which has a floor plan in the shape of an elongated cathedral. Chunky parents walk around holding the hands of their bloated children, while shoppers in tightly fitting XXL T-shirts sit around on benches consuming generous portions of fried chicken, soft-serve ice cream and smoothies.
It gets worse. He goes to Walmart with a super-fatty.
In Evansville, it feels almost unreal when Shirley Smith arrives in a taxi at the Walmart supercenter on North Burkhardt Road. She is 47, not very tall and weighs 350 lbs (159 kilograms). It takes a while before she’s extracted herself from the car, and then, supporting herself with crutches, she gets into an electric wheelchair that’s intended for people in frail health and is much too small for her. Folds of her soft flesh hang down from both sides of the seat, and she’s perspiring heavily.
You really needed to describe her folds in excrutiating detail? Gah!
Then the reporter visits an authentic German restaurant in Evansville and sounds as if he’s genuinely scared for his life.
Lunch at the Gerst Bavarian Haus restaurant is a brutal reminder of everyday life in the Midwest. Deer antlers decorate the walls under the high ceilings of a former iron-goods store, the beer of the month is Weltenburger Kloster, and the “sausage sampler” appetizer alone has an estimated 1,500 calories, 900 of them from fat.
The diners are a collection of local heavyweights, a reflection of the region’s history of German immigration. Oktoberfest is practically a daily occurrence at the Gerst Haus, which serves too much of everything at prices that are too low: sausage, schnitzel, potato salad and beer, or what Americans call “comfort food,” although it makes people sick when consumed in excess.
“A collection of local heavyweights” is cracking me the hell up as I’m reading this. DAMN YOU, GERMANS.
Not only are our German restaurants deadly, but our cars’ cup holders aren’t big enough for our 184-oz. tankards of Mountain Dew.
Many Americans drink anything that fits into the cup holders of their cars at all times of the day…. People are now drinking supersized soft drinks for breakfast, and the portions are just as big as they are at other times of the day. The 7-Eleven chain got rid of its giant Double Gulp drink size, not because of health concerns, but simply because it wouldn’t fit into cup holders in cars.
The article closes with a little scenery from the human heart attack that is modern American life.
The city is known for fried cow’s brain sandwiches, baked chicken and a street festival in early October during which 125 food vendors line up along Franklin Street. It’s supposedly the second-largest street food festival in the United States, next to Mardi Gras, in New Orleans. Vendors sell kangaroo sandwiches, bacon brownies, corndogs and deep-fried candy bars. Here, in mid-America, it feels like there’s no tomorrow.
Kangaroo sangwiches? The fuck kind of furriner food is that? Pass the fried marshmallers ‘n brown corndogs. Daddy worked up a appertite down at the swimmin’ hole today!
Top photo via Flickr. Bottom photo via Wikimedia Commons.
