Take Me Out

In Allison Leithch's article "Slow Food and the Politics of Pork Fat: Italian Food and European Identity", she describes 'symbolically defined action spaces' as spaces existing within "authentic life-form where people interact". For example, cultural and sporting events, holidays, celebrations, etc. Within these "action spaces" we find a likeness among ourselves and thus manifest a collective identity. Often, these spaces include food.

For Americans, the food found in such "action spaces" is commodified, manufactured, simply put fake. One example of such an action space would be our national past time - the baseball game.

Nothing evokes the image of America like a day at a baseball game. The immense crowds, sunny warm weather, free bobble heads, and a chance to gorge: peanuts, hot dogs, funnel cakes, nachos, hamburgers, garlic fries, beer, soda, candy; the list goes on and on. Now I have went to games with quinoa loving, tofu eating friends who seem to loose all rational and find themselves stuffing down a super dog, traced by Coors Light, and finished off with Twizlers. Excuses abound: "hey it's American", "I only go once a year", "What else do you do at a game?"

Gorging on food during celebratory or sporting events is certainty not exclusively American. What is American is the fact that our events are punctuated by fake food. High in calories, low in nutrition, and manufactured in taste, America almost prides itself on getting away with "junk".

I recently had a conversation with a friend about such "junk food binges", the pursuit and the preceding guilt. Both of us agreed that to have a junk food binge emotes the feeling of food rebellion – you know its bad but you enjoy it anyway. And nowhere is “getting away with it” so profound that the collective spaces we share as a nation. Can we really picture a baseball game with a serving of lean grilled chicken, brown rice, and veggie medley? Probably not.