Angry Man vs. Hungry
Man
Today's article is a tribute to the kind of gluttony
that can only be found in the frozen foods section of your
local grocery store. I bravely consumed the 800 pound
gorilla of frozen dinners, the notorious Swanson Hungry
Man. The mightiest of dinners for onlly the hungriest of
men, I was initially fearful as I examined my
soon-to-be-consumed over one pound of BBQ boneless pork
food. Highlights from the box:
- 930 calories!
- 81% the RDA of sodium!
- 75% the RDA of both regular fat and saturated fat!
- Microcrystalline cellulose!
- Vitamine A palmitate (maybe)!
As the meal was called Hungry Man, I made sure that I was, in fact, hungry, before consumption. Unfortunately, I became so hungry that I ate a handful of Cheez-Its, possibly decreasing the scientific reliability of my experience. First, I figured it was probably important to enjoy my Hungry Man in a classy environment, so I put on my dinner jacket (finely matched with a t-shirt starring The Thing), set the coffee table, lit a candle, and opened myself a bottle of chardonnay.
While reading the instructions, I came across a terrible
frozen food faux pas - halfway through the microwaving, you
are supposed to remove an item, finish cooking it, then
replace it. This is unacceptable. TV dinners should never,
ever, require another plate. Bad form, Swanson. I could
have just set the offending food, the brownie in this case,
on the counter I supppose, but a few images later you will
see exactly why I didn't want to do this. At any rate, I
cut, I poked, I nuked, and I chugged a beer because it was
taking really long and I felt I would need some kind of
digestive aid. Or, I could just be honest with myself and
say that I wanted a beer because I really like beer. No
need to preserve any sense of decorum here. For chrissakes,
I'm about to eat a food that proudly advertises its weight.
Midway through the cooking process, I went though the
trauma of the brownie removal process. I say trauma,
because observe the end result:
Delicious.
After four more torturous minutes, my cuisine was finally
ready!
Yeah, so wha'd you eat last night? Cold pizza? With your
hands? And a warm Pabst? Yeah, fuck that. I roll classy.
Napkin. Two forks. Candle. Classy. Fancy posturing aside,
the time was nigh to actually put the damn thing in my
mouth and hope for the best.
The operative word here is hope. The sort of empty, naive
hope that can only come from a child who just knows that
daddy will come back with those cigarettes. The meat was
not unlike McDonald's famed McRib in that it is
machine-formed pork slurry extrusion, but this was much
more rubbery. Pork-superball rubbery. However, the sauce
was tangy, which is the minimum requirement for acceptable
barbeque sauce. Note the use of minimum. It's like saying
that the minimum requirement for green bean casserole is to
contain green beans. The corn was wet and grainy, and I can
readily imagine it in a trough being noisily devoured by
hungry livestock. The potatoes were only a chemical or two
away from being potato-flavored mortar. Perhaps if combined
with cheese, the world would have a new heat shield for the
space shuttle. Despite all resemblances to feces, the
brownie was tasty, albiet unremarkable. Also, I could
clearly taste the microcrystalline cellulose.
I mulled over my experience with remote in hand and a glass
of wine perched on my now burgeoning gut. In short order, I
became outraged. Not at the poor quality of the food, which
I had assumed from that start. I was angry at the fact that
a TV dinner purported to satisfy even the most inhhuman of
appetites provided so little food, especially considering
the caloric content.
Hungry Man, you disappoint me. You have committed the
cardinal sin of gluttony - you have left me hungry. I have
been told, however, that there is also a line of Hungry Man
XL meals, which move upwards of 1200 calories per box.
Perhaps I shall revisit this topic one day, angioplasty
balloon firmly in place.