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Drowning
in a Sea of Popcorn
by Mad Dog
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Crazy Legs Conti
put on a diving mask and snorkel and was lowered into a telephone
booth-size container filled with popcorn, vowing to eat his way out.
Hey, we all need to have goals in life. |
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I’m a non-popcorn guy
living in a popcorn world. Sounds like a bad ‘80s rock song, doesn’t
it? It’s not that I hate the stuff, it’s just that, well, I have
very little use for it. I don’t eat it often, have never had a craving
for it, and I have no problem falling asleep in the middle of a movie
without it. Trust me, I do that just fine without any outside help.
It’s like tofu — on its own it has no taste. This doesn’t mean I
don’t ever want it, it’s just not something I get a sudden urge for,
like, say, pizza or malted milk balls. Face it, if it wasn’t for salt
and butter they could hand you a jumbo bag of packing peanuts or rice
cakes — sorry, that’s redundant — and you wouldn’t know the
difference if you didn’t look at it. Maybe that’s why it’s so
popular in darkened theaters.
This puts me squarely in the
minority, since Americans chow down 17 billion quarts of popcorn a year.
That’s a lot of kernels, Orville. In fact, that’s 162 million
barrels worth, which is enough to fill the gas tanks of 283 million
cars, meaning everyone in Los Angeles could drive for a day were their
cars able to run on popcorn. And they could get it through the hose and
into the tank. Okay, maybe I’ve had better ideas in my life.
To break this down into something we
can relate to on a more personal level, that’s 59 quarts of popcorn a
year for every man, woman and child in the U.S. And considering that I
probably eat a quart or two at most, that leaves plenty for someone
else. You know, someone like Crazy Legs Conti, the competitive eater —
yes guidance counselors, there is such a career — who the other day
put on a diving mask and snorkel and was lowered into a telephone
booth-size container filled with popcorn, vowing to eat his way out. The
booth held 50 cubic feet of salted, buttered popcorn, which is 1,496
quarts. That’s right, he planned on eating 25 Americans’ annual
allotment of popcorn in eight hours. Hey, we all need to have goals in
life. And hopefully a good medical plan to go with them.
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I’m not
sure what the attraction is to the smell of popcorn, unless it triggers
an urge deep within our collective unconscious to throw away a
ridiculous amount of money on something that has no nutritional value
other than fiber. |
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Lucky for him he didn’t have to pay for it, since he was doing
it to promote a documentary about his life as a window
washer/competitive eater who, just for yucks, does things like slide 168
raw oysters down his throat because, well, washing windows isn’t very
fulfilling. Or filling. It could be worse, he could have been like Oleg
Zhornitskiy who ate four 32-ounce bowls of mayonnaise in eight minutes,
or Donald Lerman who downed seven quarter-pound sticks of butter in five
minutes. Come to think of it guidance counselors, maybe you should
forget that this career exists.
So how did popcorn go from being an
Indian curiosity to a movie theater profit center? You can blame Samuel
Rubin, who died recently at age 85. Fifty years ago he introduced
popcorn to movie theaters in New York City and, as you know, anything
they do the rest of the country will soon adopt. Okay, except having a
grating accent, pushing old ladies out of the way so you can have the
cab when it’s raining, and keeping a shrine to Woody Allen in the
living room. At first Rubin made the popcorn and delivered it to the
theaters because they thought it smelled too much, but later they
figured out that was part of its allure. It’s like a dog sniffing
another dog’s butt — we think it smells gross while they probably
think popcorn smells gross. I know I do.
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The Environmental Protection Agency is studying whether
vapors from the butter flavoring causes a rare lung disease. Wouldn’t
it just suck if something that doesn’t taste remotely like real butter
turned out to be bad for you? |
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I’m not sure what the attraction is to the smell of popcorn,
unless it triggers an urge deep within our collective unconscious to
throw away a ridiculous amount of money on something that has no
nutritional value other than fiber. Hey, wood pulp supplies fiber too
but you don’t go salivating every time you smell a 2x4 being sawed in
half, do you? Okay, that was rhetorical. The worst offender is microwave
popcorn, which has a smell that travels farther than an astronaut,
sticks better than Superglue, and is more obnoxious than Ashton Kutcher
if you can imagine such a thing. Worse, it may actually be harmful.
It’s true. The Environmental
Protection Agency (motto: “Is it getting warmer in here or is it
me?”) is studying whether vapors from the butter flavoring causes a
rare lung disease. Wouldn’t it just suck if something that doesn’t
taste remotely like real butter turned out to be bad for you? Apparently
workers who mix popcorn flavorings get this respiratory illness. It’s
bad enough their family can smell them as soon as they’re two blocks
from home, they don’t need this too.
Conti didn’t have to worry about
this, since he didn’t stay in the popcorn for but eight hours. And
apparently only ate his way down to his shoulders before calling it
quits. He said the popcorn wasn’t so bad, it was the “butter” —
and I’m required by law and personal ethics to put that in quotes —
that did him in. He ended up eating about eight cubic feet of popcorn,
which is 239 quarts, or the annual average consumption of four people.
Good, now I don’t have to feel bad about not eating my allotment.
©2004 Mad Dog
Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
These columns appear in better newspapers across the country.
Read them while licking popcorn "butter" off your
fingers.
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