LOL Interwebz: The Fried Cheese That WOULD NOT DIE

Each week in LOL Interwebz, Luke T. Harrington explores the quirks and foibles of Internet culture from a Gospel perspective.

There’s a fascinating (in the same way a train wreck is fascinating) article over at Gawker that chronicles journalist Caity Weaver’s quest to truly eat all that she can eat at T.G.I. Friday’s ongoing “endless appetizers” deal, where you can have endless mozzarella sticks (or one of several other options) for a flat fee of $10. It’s the perfect storm of nearly everything horrible about America: fried cheese, bottomless food, sitting for long periods, selfies, lightweight gonzo journalism, and free ketchup.

It’s also hilarious and a great read. I’ll wait. You can go read it. In fact, you can read it as many times as you want, for one low, low price. You’re welcome.

You back? That was fun, right? The perfect mixture of fun and grueling, sort of like fourteen hours at a T.G.I. Friday’s would be, I’d think.

For my money, though, mozzarella sticks, like all-you-can-eat deals, are a symptom of a culture that has no concept of subtlety: “Hey! Y’know how delicious salty, congealed milkfat is? Why don’t we coat it in salty bread and then drown it in even more fat? Wouldn’t that be amazing?” It’s the exact same sort of thinking as “Hey, food is amazing! Wouldn’t, like, a ton of food be even more amazing?”

Well…probably not? In Weaver’s defense, she claims Friday’s mozz sticks are terrible (“Ingredients include: cardboard left in a hamster cage in the sun; acid”), but even if they had been the finest mozz sticks in all the land, somehow I doubt she would have enjoyed all fourteen hours of eating them. Fat and salt are like any other addictive substance: you continue consuming them long after you stop deriving pleasure from the experience.

It makes me think there’s a reason why fasting is an almost universal discipline across religions. In Christianity in particular, there’s a clear sense that the pleasures of the world (like endless deep-fried fat) are a good gift of God and intended to be enjoyed, and yet believers are still encouraged to abstain from time to time. Not because the gifts become bad, but because when we focus on them instead of the Giver, our experience of them becomes empty and unsatisfying. That which was once delicious loses its flavor. That which once nourished begins to sicken. That which was necessary becomes compulsory.

The funny thing about civilization is that it leads to abundance, and what was once a necessary banding together of creatures for survival becomes the new normal as goods and services pile up. Survival is no longer enough; one now is expected to amass large quantities of possessions and gorge oneself on the bounty of the earth. Man’s chief end is no longer to glorify God and enjoy him forever but to chase immediate, personal gratification. Luxuries like cheese and deep fat become something even people gauche enough to eat at Friday’s can expect not just in abundance but in unlimited quantities.

There was a time when such gluttony would have been disdained by society; now it’s commonplace. Chain restaurants pile on the calories without any real sense of shame anymore, often banking both on the cheap abundance of ingredients and the WTF factor to draw people in their doors. And most of us have been eating Double-Downs ironically for so long that we don’t even know whether they’re a joke anymore.

Every year on Easter, my pastor throws a party in his home, with an egg-decorating contest, games, and an abundance of food. I watched the hors d’oeuvre table with interest this year, as everyone (myself included) made a beeline for deviled eggs, which disappeared almost as quickly as our hosts could put them out. “You can tell we’re all starved for protein after fasting all Lent,” I commented, and everyone said, “Well, duh.”

And it was clear in the moment why fasting matters. Going without luxuries like protein for so long had made their consumption much sweeter and more meaningful, as we shared them in community, celebrating something real and true. That the eggs were in abundance was a nice plus, but if that had been their raison d’être, it would have been no party at all.