Biscuits are the Spoons you can Eat

Biscuits are the Spoons you can Eat

During spring break I drove through a number of southern states. On the way to sunny Florida I decided to have one of my favorite foods, a cheeseburger, in the different states to compare how culture can influence the same type of food. Cheeseburger number one was at the World’s Largest Culvers. Dazed from driving all day I went to order and when asked “single, double, or triple” my brain filled in the sentence with “bypass” before I realized he meant the number of patties. In due diligence for research I ordered a triple of the Midwest beef Pollan tells us about. The burger was excellent. (Please know I don’t usually do this type of thing.)

The next day I had a cheeseburger from a Five Guys in Tennessee. My god. It was more hamburger than I’ve seen (or eaten) in my life. Five guys only goes up to a double, in terms of patty number and cardiac bypass potential, so the comparison is not direct. Nonetheless, the double was larger than anything I’ve hefted to face in the past. I felt like I was Guy Fieri about to take a bite of some monstrosity and yell about flavortown. When in the Five Guys a young girl was eagerly licking ketchup off of whatever surface it could be applied to. I couldn’t help but notice the size of her and the size of those in her family, and wonder if this could be correlated to the huge portion size. I was reminded of a billboard we had driven past earlier in the which read “Biscuits are the spoons that you can eat.” I laughed at this, and then sat back to realize that it was an entirely serious advertising campaign. However, this billboard was in contention with another advertising sliced white bread as “A Dieter’s Dream at 35 Calories a Slice.”

It seems that the south, perhaps America as a whole, has a love-hate relationship with carbs. Carbs, to paraphrase Lewis Black, are what got us humans to evolve to where we are today and what we’ve always eaten. When I was thinking about the carbs eaten by my family and the carbs eaten in the south I realized that a crucial difference was in the processing. It’s the eating of bleach white bread rather than polenta or ziti. My mother, a Mediterranean woman, subsists on a diet of sausage and peppers, pasta many nights a week, wine, and then more sausage and red meat. Yet, she’s healthier than my father, and by the numbers of her cholesterol, bp, and weight, healthier than most of America. She even gets mistaken for my sibling. She is almost strangely healthy. I realized that in the south people were eating what I’ve come to think of as calorically dense foods, where the serving size is not just large in terms of covering the plate but large in terms of the number of calories conveyed to the mouth with each bite. I realized that for all of the pasta we eat, it’s the wheat talked about by Pollan as favorable to our body. It’s not been processed into the equivalent of brick of energy.

While some may say blame all carbs for making us fat, I suggest it’s the biscuit spoons.