I’m not a guy who can easily mask his feelings, and I guess I more or less telegraphed where I’m coming from in that headline up there: along with virtually every one of my Rake colleagues, most of whom I don’t personally know, I have a beef with Andrew Zimmern. And, yes, I know I said up there that I had a bone to pick, but since the topic at hand is food I feel excused in mixing my metaphors, if in fact that’s what I’m doing, or did.
At any rate, what’s my big problem with Zimmern? Where to begin, where to begin? First, I should admit that I really don’t know who this Zimmern fellow is. I mean, I really don’t know who the hell he is, just as, I’m sure, he doesn’t know who the hell I am. I got wind of a recent dust-up in the blogosphere, however, and felt curious enough to search Google for images of the man. I start there whenever possible, because I have no problem at all judging a book by its cover, being a firm believer in that old business about a picture being worth a thousand words.
At any rate, I spent some time looking at photographs of a man alleged to be Zimmern and quickly concluded that a thousand words were something like 975 words too many; a couple dozen, I should think, would suffice.
I can definitely tell you that I don’t like the cut of Zimmern’s jib. I think he eats too much, and given that he apparently spends so much time eating, I also think it’s fair to presume that he eats bugs ... no, wait—he does, it seems, eat bugs, but what I meant to say was that it’s fair to presume that he talks with his mouth full. I don’t care for that.
I dug a little deeper to find out more about this Zimmern character, and discovered not only that—as I suspected—he eats too much, but he also eats almost entirely at places I’ve never heard of. I’m not a big fan of people who make a habit of eating at places I’ve never heard of, then proceed to go on and on about how great those places are.
I’m guessing that Zimmern has never spent a morning hanging drywall and then, with dust all over his hands (and under his fingernails), eaten the hell out of a Manwich and a can of Pringles. I’m also guessing that he’s never spent a cold afternoon in the garage skinning muskrats then driven his truck to the Arby’s drive-thru and polished off the 5-for-$5.99 roast beef special all by his lonesome.
Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe Zimmern has, in fact, laid drywall and eaten the hell out of a Manwich and a can of Pringles. Maybe he has skinned muskrats and gone to Arby’s to gorge solo. But I’ll say this: if I’m correct in my suppositions—and I feel confident that I am—then I’m also correct in saying that this is a man who doesn’t know a diddly-damn thing about truly great food and the supreme pleasures and surprises of eating when you’re flat-out hungry as shit.
Answer me these questions, Zimmern, you hot shot:
• Have you ever eaten a pie from Beek’s, King of Pizza?
• Under the right circumstances (very, very hungry; very, very stoned and/or drunk; etc.) could you rave for hours about the wings at Shorty and Wag’s?
• Can you name, with appropriate enthusiasm, a favorite brand of canned chili?
• Could you, do you honestly think, tackle the Tremendous Twelve at Perkins?
• Have you ever been so fucking hungry that you’ve eaten a microwave hamburger from SuperAmerica and felt like you’d died and gone to heaven?
•Might you, as I did this very evening, mix together cans of Progresso vegetable beef and beef barley soup and eat the whole damn pot while seated on the kitchen floor?
• Have you ever spent hours driving along a freeway praying for the appearance of a Taco John’s?
• Do you agree that Tootsie Rolls and pretzels are often as not a perfectly suitable lunch?
If you answered no to even half of these questions, Zimmern, you’re not only a piss-poor food critic, but you’re also a pussy.
