The Taste of Freedom: Eating Like an American for Four Weeks

Now that the Christian holiday of Easter is past, it caused me to reflect on what this time of year is all about:  Eating.  In line with this, I present to you a video, a video which made me unimaginably happy as it combined two of my favourite things:  Food, and introducing people to new food.  It has been doing the rounds on The Interwebs for a little while, but if you haven’t seen it, please check it out below:

A few notes on this clip before I continue:

• I did not know Rock Shandy was a South African thing.  I would have chosen something far more representative, like witblits or a Springbokkie.  (Though, I s’pose we don’t want BuzzFeed contributors slamming down two witblitses then getting into a fistfight about rugby, now do we?)
• Why they gotta disrespect Anchovette like that?  This was a breakfast staple in my house for years, and if it tastes like penguin food, then it’s the penguin food that only rich penguins who drive automatic cars eat.
• The thing about rusks is that, unless you’re dipping them in coffee, eating them is kind of like non-penetrative sex:  You’re still gonna have a good time, but you’re kind of missing out on the best part.
• Those were the crappest koeksisters I have ever seen, and yet the panel fucking lost their collective minds like they had just seen The Lion King for the first time.  Imagine they had been served decent koeksisters, I think people could have been persuaded to fight each other wearing hand wraps studded with broken glass for just one more.

Now that that’s out of the way: 

Upon viewing this video, my mind began to wander back to the halcyon days of my mid-twenties and some time I spent in the USA, and how much fun I had submerged in their food culture.  Thus, herewith I present you with my memories of Eating Like An American For Four Weeks:

 (Another note before I continue:

Most of what is to follow is my review of various fast food franchises that I encountered as a complete stranger to most of them.  The reason it is mostly fast food is:

1. That’s all I ate in my twenties, until my wife beat me with a wet sack of quinoa and got me to reform my diet.  (Just kidding…  She withheld sex, which is faaaaaaaaaaar more effective)
2. I was not travelling on the largest of budgets, and had blown a substantial amount of what little I did have on some pointless but wonderful memorabilia which I don’t regret at all, except for this one.

But still, fast food is what most Americans seem to eat, anyway, and so it was likely an authentic experience nonetheless.

Note further that I also tried to focus on franchises not currently available in South Africa, for a better depth of experience, and to try and make co-workers jealous)

In no particular order:

Hardee’s:  This franchise is the reason I walked around with more-or-less continuous heartburn for the first four days of my stay in the US.  I tried them because they had just launched the Monster Thickburger a few weeks before I arrived, and I figured any institution with that level of culinary daring deserved some sort of further investigation.  However, my first clue that maybe this place may not be what you would call “fine dining” was the fact that the shopfront adjoined a petrol station.  Still, the burgers were delightful in their excess (And curly fries are to regular fries what Katy Perry is to your old geography teacher), but I have to say that I enjoyed regional stalwarts Back Yard Burgers much more.

Pizza Hut:  Any South African native to Durban will hear me talking about Pizza Hut and probably say something like:  “Hey, what kind, guy?  I choon you dat we had a Pizza Hut at Pavilion for span of years!”  (If you think the previous sentence was racially insensitive to South African Indians, then you’ve never been to Durban…)  And yes, that’s true, the Pavilion shopping centre in Durban did host the last South African Pizza Hut for a long, long time.  But I had to try its American cousin to see how close we got to it.  Answer:  Not very.  While I enjoyed the pizza I ate at Pavilion, Americans are just so Goddamned creative with this stuff – Stuffed pretzel crust, anyone? – that our piffling attempts at, like, cheese and onion pizza pale in comparison.  While we’re on the subject:

Joey’s House of Pizza:  Fans of Seinfeld will recall the tyrannical reign of the Soup Nazi.  Well, I had the distinct pleasure of encountering Nashville’s own Pizza Nazi , Joey M. of the afore-mentioned House of Pizza, during one fateful lunch break.  My initial assumptions that my colleagues were exaggerating the guy’s reputation were quickly dispelled when the lady in front of me, who had ordered a single slice of plain pizza, was rebuffed with a brusque:  “Is that all, ya big spender??”  Still, I found it highly amusing when the esteemed Mr. M. mistook my accent for a German one, shouting “Schnellen!  Schnellen!!” at his kitchen staff whilst remaining wonderfully oblivious to the delicious irony.  I ordered a full pizza to take home for supper, and when I stood up to claim the wrong pizza, the following was barked directly into my face:  “I told you I’d call you!  Did I call you??”  It was all I could do not to click my heels together in salute to the Oberführer as I shrank back into my seat.  Still, the pizza was tasty in the way that only handmade, woodfired pizza is, and I’d put up with that crap for another slice of Joey’s pepperoni pizza any day.

Wendy’s:  Get that shit right the fuck out of my face.

Krispy Kreme:  I would seriously murder one of my cousins for a dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts.  And not one of the distant cousins I barely know, either:  I would put the names of all my favourite first cousins in a hat, then draw one out and kill that person if my reward was 12 of those delicious, creamy nuggets of heavenly goodness.  If America ever wanted to invade South Africa, they would just have to open a Krispy Kreme in each of our major cities and then wait until we all died of Type II diabetes.

Taco Bell:  My memories of eating Taco Bell run into one of my favourite stories about travelling in the USA, which I will relate here:

My four weeks in the US were split into 2 stays of 2 weeks each, the second of which occurred in January 2006.  On the second night of the second stay, I decided to have Taco Bell for supper, as there was one conveniently located between my hotel and the place where I was working.  To interject, at this point:  Having Mexican food for dinner flies in the face of all conventional heartburn-related wisdom.  Accordingly, it was no surprise when I woke up at 10 pm – A mere 3 hours after having slumped into a jet-lagged sleep – Feeling like the stretch of alimentary canal running from my navel to my throat had been doused in rubbing alcohol and set on fire.  There was no further sleep to be had until this situation was remedied, and so I set out to find an all-night pharmacy and some antacids.

The outfit I chose was born of the necessity of stumbling around in the dark, sleep-deprived and wishing I was dead.  Thus, I outfitted myself in a T-shirt, a pair of sweatpants and flip-flops.  Those of you who have travelled in the northern hemisphere at this time of year will have spotted my mistake immediately.  To whit:  I go outside and it’s fucking snowing.  Now, I hadn’t seen snow in appreciable quantities up to that point in my life, so I set off into the parking lot like a child who’s been let out of school.  (A six-foot-two, 110-kilo child with hair on his back, but a child nonetheless)  I ran off to my rental car and began scooping snow off the windscreen, smooshing it into a giant snowball and grinning like an idiot.

At this point, it occurs to me that my then-girlfriend, now-wife wasn’t with me.  The reason this is poignant is because we had both promised each other that the first time we saw snow, we would do so together.  I suddenly missed her with a ferocity that I hadn’t thought possible, so now I was crying and laughing at the same time…

At which point some random dude rounded the corner of the hotel, on his way to the laundry.  The sight of a barely-dressed behemoth holding about a kilo of melting snow and laughing through his tears proved too much for this mild-mannered gentleman, and he made a small noise of surprise before rapidly heading back in the direction of his room.

And I suppose that brings us full circle.  Food is good.  We need food.  But unless we’re sharing with those we care about, it really is just a survival exercise, not a celebration of love and joy. 

And that, I guess, is what these holiday periods are all about.  So, here’s hoping that, no matter how much you enjoyed the chocolate that Easter brought, you enjoyed the company of those you shared it with more.

Happy holidays, bitches.