REFLECTIONS ON SIN AND VICE

Extreme dining (The Guardian, August 23rd, 2006)

You do not forget your first encounter with a Burger King Stacker Quad. Mine happened in a particularly dispiriting branch of the fast-food chain, on Eighth Avenue in New York - a windowless underground outlet, accessible via a flight of stairs, or alternatively by a stairlift capable of supporting someone weighing up to 450lb. The Stacker Quad, as you discover when you summon the nerve to order it, consists of four beef patties, four slices of cheese, and four strips of bacon in a bun, all glistening in far more grease than a regular Whopper or Big Mac. There is no trace of lettuce or tomato or onion, a fact specifically singled out for celebration in the TV ads that accompanied the launch of the Stacker product range in the United States a few weeks ago. [...]

The Stacker may be extraordinary, but it is far from unique. Recent times have seen the launch - mainly in America for now, but give it time - of a rash of products that the industry calls "indulgent offerings": foods marketed specifically on the basis of how much meat and cheese and how few annoying vegetables they contain. Earlier in the day at Burger King, it could have been the Meat'Normous Omelet Sandwich; over at Denny's, the Extreme Grand Slam Breakfast; at Hardee's, another US chain, the Monster Thickburger (two thirds-of-a-pound slices of Angus beef, eight bacon strips and three cheese slices in a buttered bun). Hardee's calls the Thickburger "a monument to decadence", although they might equally have pointed out that it is a handy way for the average adult male to consume 70% of his recommended daily calorific intake in a single meal.

It is worth recalling how strange these developments would have seemed just two years ago, when the fast-food backlash was at its height. Burger chains across the world, responding to alarming market research, began offering salads and fruit and fresh juices. McDonald's launched the GoActive meal, which consisted of a salad, bottled water and a pedometer; it also began phasing out its supersized meals, though it insisted the policy had nothing to do with the surprise success of Morgan Spurlock's documentary Super Size Me, the stomach-churning film that came to symbolise the uprising. The American burger restaurant Wendy's added a fresh-fruit bowl to its menu; at the end of last year, the company quietly killed it, blaming a lack of demand. "We listened to consumers who said they wanted to eat fresh fruit," a disarmingly honest spokesman told the New York Times, "but apparently they lied."

Now that the great tobacco wars are over and the shock troops reduced to mopping up operations in remote backwaters, the improving classes have turned their heavy ordnance towards the nation’s girth and our abominable eating habits. Even the most casual traveller quickly sees that vice--bad food, tobacco, alcohol, gambling, etc.--flourish and fester more in Red America than in Blue America, which at times can appear to be populated exclusively by lithe and fashionable folks of bright pallor jogging through traffic and snacking on pomegranates and imported water. Indeed, some days the health and recreational habits of the heartland can look so appalling that one’s faith in its denizens as a bedrock of common sense and virtue can be shaken badly.

Or so it can seem at first blush. A closer look into the culture of perfect health reveals that much of it goes far beyond sensible calls for moderation and is built on a fixation with self that spirals downward (or inward) to ever-greater levels of psychic fragility and self-absorption. As appalling as the obese fellow packing in the ribs and cream pie may be, his modern counterpart is often not the outward-looking Renaissance man seeking balance and harmony as he navigates a rich and fascinating world, but the neurotic, self-fixated bore whose idea of an interesting dinner party discussion is this.

Vice is distinguished from sin by its frequency. Few seriously believes there is much wrong with a Saturday night cigar, the monthly bender among friends or the indulging of a sweet tooth by the harried mother five pounds overweight. It’s whether the self-control will hold that worries us, for a runaway vice ruins in many ways. By contrast, the modern trendy professional who boasts that he has only defrauded his clients twice in his life or is careful to ration his adulteries strictly does not elicit a lot of admiration. But is there a connection between the two? The essence of sin is self-love and the test of the mettle of any civilization is the degree to which its citizens will sacrifice self-interest for the good of their children and society around them. Is it possible that most fallible humans need some kind of self-indulgence to compensate for the sacrifice of time, money, peace of mind and freedom that implies and that those sacrifices won’t necessarily continue to be made without them? Or that abandoning those sacrifices and living for oneself makes it easier to conquer vice?

Blue America has abolished sin and is marked by weak, inward-looking characters in astoundingly healthy bodies. Red America carries the torch of morality and commitment to family, church, community and nation, and yet seems forever to be waging an unequal war against the beautiful people thundering on about one unhealthy habit after another.