It was a Thanksgiving meal for 10, but Tim Janus devoured it alone in just 15 minutes as part of a public relations stunt to draw attention to New York City’s hungry…. “What’s so important about today is that it begins to fill my stomach up and I can now leave a little more for everybody else,” Janus said after consuming a 10-pound turkey, four pounds of mashed potatoes, three pounds of cranberry sauce and 2 1/2 pounds of beans. And he still had room for dessert: an entire pumpkin pie. Janus a Major League Eater champion who holds world titles in cannolis, marshmallow Peeps and tiramisu said the league was donating $6,000 to the Food Bank for New York City a sum that will provide 30,000 meals. Last week, the league gave $4,000 to Second Harvest food bank.
Well, you can spank my naked butt and call me Shirley, but I don’t get this bit of hypocritical and insensitive theater. Hmm…people are going hungry, so Janus decides that an appropriate way to celebrate this is by staging an homage to gluttony and excess? WTF? How many people could have been fed by the food he wasted by stuffing it down his gullet? And since when is gluttony in the face of food insecurity EVER to be considered an appropriate response? Of course, this make for some interesting and unique approaches to shining a spotlight on several social ills:
We could highlight the problems of unlicensed handguns in the hands of criminals by popping caps into the asses of random passers-by at a mall during Christmas. That’ll teach Mom to dawdle in the Gap….
We could celebrate the accomplishments of groups like Alcoholics Anonymous by going to an AA meeting and handing out free bottles of Stolichnaya. Anyone need a mixer with that?
Drawing attention to the plight of the homeless? That’s easy; we just hand out baseball bats to angry teenage boys and turn them loose in a homeless camp. Swing and a miss….
For Drug-Free Schools Week: free acid blotters for everyone!! Chemistry class will never be quite the same….
Eating disorders? Well, it would appear that we’ve come full-circle back to competitive gluttony. How about having Pizza Hut or Domino’s sponsor a pizza-eating contest. We could tie bulimic girls to chairs and force them to watch competitive eaters go through their paces.
It’s easy for me to ridicule Janus for this ridiculously inappropriate display of insensitivity, but I truly do not understand why anyone would thing that competitive gluttony is the way to draw attention to hunger in this country. If Janus and Major League Eating wanted to truly make a difference, they could have done so without the self-promotion inherent in Janus’ spectacle.
Jeebus, what a DUMB@$$….
