"Why Fat People Should Have Their Own Special Restaurant"
and see
here too. [I quote from both articles]
Joshua Ozersky, founder of New York magazine's Grub Street food blog, wrote a huge piece for the magazine Gastronomica, about how he wants to design a restaurant exclusively for fat people (via Zagat Buzz).
Ozersky says he's not trying to offend anyone, he's been "varying degrees of fat" his entire life, and his goal is to just make the dining experience better for overweight customers.
Current restaurants in our society have all been designed by "slim androgynes wearing Buddy Holly glasses," Ozersky writes in the essay, which Zagat says is basically his version of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal.
Here's how he'd do it:
The restaurant would have overweight, friendly servers who say lines such as "Do you want some more coffee, Hon?"
The seats would resemble La-Z-Boy recliners and the temperature inside would be about 35 degrees, helping keep the slim people out and "refrigerating" the fat people to "help keep their bodies going."
There would be no mirrors and only dim lighting inside. And the bill would be paid by an EZ Pass like device so there would be no waiting after the food is consumed and the customer wanted to leave.
The menu would consist of large joints of meat, platters of fried food such as cutlets and onion rings, grilled cheese, heavy stews, variations of hamburgers and multilayer cakes.
And why this should happen? Ozersky explains:
You may be thinking, aren’t all restaurants designed for fat people? They’re not, not really. For one thing, almost all good restaurants are designed by slim androgynes wear-ing Buddy Holly glasses...The servers are slim and winsome....The cooks themselves, who in happier times were the very images of portly mirth, are now sinewy whippets, the cords of their young muscles visible beneath full-sleeve tattoos.
Looks like just another
elitist foodie snob, putting down the fatter people. He looks like a clone of a certain famous mega-church preacher.
The original article,
see here, is called
"A Proposal for Feeding the Fat and Anxious" | Josh Ozersky" I've been around foodies before, usually they are very rich--well the official ones, and while they talk about food a lot, a lot of them seem to be extremely fat phobic, it is almost like a picture of the anorexic's clinical extreme focus on food, where one part of the pictures is that some anorexics love to cook and focus on food while not eating any of it. I know I have my 'foodie" tendencies, with all my talk of slow food and avoiding the toxic stuff, but I definitely do not live in their socio-economic class. Hey I like people of all kinds, but why do these types always have to act so
elitist?
I found this stuff rude, even if he is plump himself, he doesn't seem to be any different from the usual fat haters, who put fat people down. I know he was being sarcastic at the expense of us fat people.
Even him wanting a cold temperature in the restaurant like that is just nastiness, surely every fat person is a sweating behemoth who is always hot to a guy like this. Not me. I found myself even freezing in a room that was 74 degrees last night. I had won a temperature gauge and alarm clock in one at a white elephant party. Notice what he writes
here:
The restaurant should be cold, too cold for thin people. This will have the doubly benficial effect of driving thin people out, because, really, who wants to look at thin people? And of course fat people, their swollen, unhealthy bodies working hard just to pointlessly stay alive, are fiery furnaces deep within, churning and chewing away beneath troubled brows.
"Fiery furnaces deep within", is he insane? I wish. And the "pointlessly alive" comment, well we know when fat bigots go to town, they can even question our reason for existing and do so with impunity. Hey maybe that is a reason for the "troubled brows". Also look at the menu he outlays, more bigotry there, surely the obese want to scarf down the most greasiest heaviest food according to a guy like this.
One wonders even about the class issues, shown here. He imagines the fat as all poor, lazing about in semi-broken down Lazy-Boys, wanting to eat grilled cheese sandwiches on Wonder Bread using only margarine. Oh the horrors! This isn't a guy who has gone to Whole Foods and called it Whole Paycheck. He makes sure to sprinkle 50 cent words among the paragraph to impress us underlings with his superior knowledge.
Grilled cheese prepared on the conceivable bread, thin and diaphanous to the point of abstraction, orgiastically slathered with oleomargarine, and containing nourishing, viscous, mild and rich slices of bright-orange American cheese, such as gluttons remember from the faint mists of their childhood, when a future entombed in necrotic, immobilízìng tallow still lay unimagined.
Oh and he couldn't resist this humdinger:
Speaking of sexuality, there shouldn’t be any. Dining here is a solitary and celibate experience, in which both sexes are protected from even a hint of having to socialize.
I guess in the foodie world, only fellow thin people exist and are the only ones allowed to date. In Manhattan, if you are over a size 10, you're not welcomed! Hey I lived in a huge city, at times I wanted a decent meal, I didn't have to cook and would save up the money to get a decent lunch, dinner was out of the question financially, and I dealt with the types that didn't want the "uncool" messing up the place. Imagine a guy wanting to design restaurants for other groups to ostracize and discriminate against them, that wouldn't have made it past the editing room floor, joke or no joke.
I have some ideas for a restaurant for fat people. How about some chairs that actually are made for people who weigh over 150lbs? How about a few glasses of actual fresh water with ice? How about some food I do not have to worry about having my guts feel like they are being wrenched out of my body after eating? How about some food that does not swim in pools of grease or for your Americans out there, doesn't automatically have the de rigeur stack of potatoes next to it or a glob of oily cheese smeared across the top of it. Someone please tell the people adding cheese to steaks, that is gross beyond belief.
How about a place that serves fresh food, that doesn't come canned, frozen or to be microwaved. I'm talking to a certain chain Italian restaurant that is country wide here, I can tell you didn't cook it there in that kitchen but shipped it from a commissionary somewhere.
How about meals, where the food is affordable, and one doesn't have to take out a loan just to find and eat something decent? My days of lunch at decent restaurants have ended since the late 90s due to the burgeoning costs. I either cook it myself, go to the coffeeshop that believes in more wholesome food or go without. How about bringing salad bars back and having salads with real vegetables on them instead of just ice berg and a few limp carrot slices and more cheese?
Also some of us are tired of pizzas, subs, and hamburgers, can't you people think of anything else?
LOL as some of you can tell my own frustrations with restaurants is pretty high. I am praying some people move to town and open a health food restaurant, because I need one BAD. Where you can go eat some real food! Sometimes one can luck out with Chinese restaurants that still use real food to cook their stuff, or coffee shops that make home made bread and decent sandwiches and salads, but for some of us, restaurant food has sunk so low in quality.
Should one have to be super-rich to afford a decent meal? I wonder too why no one makes real dinner food in restaurants anymore unless you have 100 bucks for every two people. I'm old enough to remember when someone could buy a decent slice of meatloaf or a steak even and some real vegetables to go on the side without emptying out the bank account to do it!
By the way some of us are tired of everything being fried too. It seems the lazy man's easy way of cooking. We do not want everything breaded and fried. Fried food too, isn't supposed to be a daily meal but a treat once in a while. Try and be more creative, something is wrong when a whole column in your menu is nothing but various fried items all cooked together in the same bumbling stew of old oil.
Too bad this guy hates fat people so much, he just correlated around 10 stereotypes about fat people into one very offensive article. He is fat himself, well judging from the picture which is only a facial one, at least 50lbs over I'd say. Does he feel that bad about himself to write something to get his fellow thin foodies to cheer that he is really "one of them"?
I want to write for a foodie magazine too. I find skinny snobs all drooling over food, to be kind of funny. It should be kind of amusing for me too. Why not a food movement for REAL PEOPLE and tell the snobs, to take a hike? We need that more then ever now.
