Uber-food

There’s something strange going on with food. It’s mutating. It’s getting very weird, very over-the-top.

My sister-in-law, a doctor, calls it “über-food.” I think she means food that is shot full of steroids, layered with CGI special effects. She recently sampled the Lechon Pizza from Pizza Hut. (Pizza Hut is not the first to add sinful Pinoy food to their regular fare; Greenwich was there first with the Sisig Pizza.) She said the Lechon Pizza was excellent, though I declined to sample it, having already consumed half a pizza earlier at the office. Reportedly, ever since word began spreading on Facebook and other bizarre food cult sites, Pizza Hut is always sold out of Lechon Pizza. It’s almost become a sort of urban myth among Filipino über-food addicts.

Why are people eating food that’s out of control?

Why do so many fast-food restaurants (mostly American brands, but also local outlets) offer such obscene food creations? Are they trying to kill us?

Maybe they’re just filling a need out there for bold new life experiences — you know, like clogged arteries, high-blood pressure and gout. Maybe it’s because Pinoys tend to look upon food as mountaineers might gaze upon Everest: they must consume it… because it’s there.

So imagine you’re one of those people who’ve had enough of the regular, everyday carbo- and calorie-overload food that’s available. Let’s say you want to experience food that never says never, that doesn’t know when to quit, that practically hums Edith Piaf’s Je Ne Regrette Rien as it marches its way down your gullet and thickens your arteries.

Friend, you’re ready for über-food.

I’ll be back: The New Baconator from Wendy’s promises even more opportunities to pass the Lipitor.

The Lechon Pizza is just a local response to a worldwide trend. A couple of years ago, Americans started doing insane, ridiculous things with bacon: wrapping it around hamburgers, stuffing it into sausages, adding it to doughnuts, ice cream, even vodka. One US place sold something known as the Bacon Explosion — described as “a barbecued meat brick composed of two pounds of bacon wrapped around two pounds of sausage.” The calorie count is in the thousands.

Arteries, it’s time to dial “911.”

Then Wendy’s, that genial American fast-food chain, came out with the “Baconator” — something like six strips of bacon piled on a half pound of grilled beef topped by slabs of melted cheese.

Think that slowed anybody down? Guess again. Now what some call “gonzo gastronomy” has spread to the Philippines, and it seems they’ve come to the right place, judging by the ravenous enthusiasm for, say, Greenwich’s Hungarian Sausage and Bacon Overload, or KFC’s newest contribution to food excess, the Double Down.

The Double Down is actually something I tried on a whim: it’s an oddity consisting of a handful of pork bacon strips, cheese and mayonnaise — all sandwiched between “two original recipe chicken fillets.” There’s no bread involved (perhaps in a nod to those still pretending to be on the Atkins Diet); you simply grasp the chunk of meat and goo nestled between two more chunks of meat and start chomping away. (My wife asked if it comes with Lipitor as an after-dinner mint.)

Surprisingly, it doesn’t fall apart; and not surprisingly, it tastes pretty damn good. But along with the instant gratification that comes from enjoying something as deliberately decadent as the Double Down — something that food analysts say strives to hit all our food “bliss points” at once (these bliss points include fat, sugar and salt) — there is an almost immediate letdown after eating, a post-gluttonous sensation that probably is akin to what users of crack might experience after the first drug rush fades: one feels a little sick, and perhaps a slight urge to, as Alex in A Clockwork Orange says, “snuff it.”

Duckenurkey, anyone?: The fabled turducken has spread from overkill kitchens in the US to Philippine shores, just in time to make your Christmas heart attack truly memorable. Be afraid.

Food excess as near-death experience? Well, let’s just say maybe le petit mort doesn’t only apply to sex.

Then there are the bastardized dishes being served up by Greenwich (again!) called Top That Pizzas. These include — and I quote — “Buffalo Chicken & Onion Rings Pizza” and “Meatballs & Fries Pizza.” Who decided that pizza all of a sudden needed to scale new heights, resembling a high school kid’s science project model of Mt. Pinatubo? (For an extra P30, you can add “Rolled-Edge Thick Crust” to raise the stakes even higher.)

Of course, at the root of all this über-food revelry is a kind of conscious middle finger directed at all the health warnings being raised out there — the spoilsports who say Americans (and, by extension, those throughout the globe who consume its fast food) are becoming horribly obese and lethargic due to unhealthy nutrition choices, much like those rotund La-Z-Boy characters in Wall-E. Screw that, say the über-food champions: Pass the bacon ice cream. It turns out that everybody loves to be told what to eat, but nobody likes to be told what not to eat.

Contrary to my sister-in-law’s definition, I believe “über-food” was originally meant to describe only esoteric dishes — things devised in El Bulli’s kitchen, or involving rare, exotic ingredients. It wasn’t meant to describe fast food. But in a democratic turn of events, high-calorie excess has apparently dripped down to the masses. Soon, everybody will be able to enjoy that once-rare condition known as the “Disease of Kings”: gout.

Foods of mass destruction: That’s not the sound of bacon exploding in the Bacon Explosion — it’s your heart!

So what can you do when we live in a world where food has become yet another sector of entitlement — a zone, much like world travel, where people feel like they have to experience every imaginable gustatory sensation before they die? (And, perhaps in some cases, directly before they die?) Eat, drink and be merry, as they say.

Anyway, Christmas in the Philippines has always been a contest of “How much can you eat and still keep your eyes from involuntarily crossing and your legs from swelling up with uric acid?” Eating large is nothing new here in the holiday season,. But I had never before heard so many people going on about the joys of something called the “turducken.” What’s a turducken? As one enthusiast describes it, “You get a duck, stuff it with chicken and sausage, and stuff the entire thing into a turkey. Cook it for seven hours under low heat (250 degrees) and serve it with truffle gravy.”

My first response was, “Shouldn’t that be called a duckenurkey?” My second response was, “That’s just sick. But, maybe I’ll try it sometime…” Like most things in the land of über-food, the concept alone is almost sufficient; actually putting such a Frankenstein creation in your mouth seems redundant. And way, waaaay over the top.