Man vs Food

This burrito is bigger than my roommate's girlfriend. By the transitive property, Adam Richman is a cannibal.

We’ve all met plenty of snobs who turn up their noses and say, “I don’t watch reality TV – it’s so puerile.” For example, if you’ve ever met me before, you’ve met one of those snobs. I don’t like reality TV because real people are fundamentally less interesting than fake people invented by writers, and because their petty, stupid conflicts are too similar to my own; when I watch TV, I want to see people who have to deal with zombies or genocidal robots on a daily basis, if I want to see an argument about who needs to clean the kitchen, I can just leave my room.

What I’ve found with a lot of my fellow TV snobs, though, is that we’ve all got one weak point. “I don’t watch reality TV… Except for What Not To Wear, because there’s actually a lot of good fashion tips on that show.” “I don’t watch reality TV… Except Nanny 911, because it’s really inspiring what they do to turn those kids around.” “I don’t watch reality TV… Except Jersey Shore, because I’m stupid.”

In that case, I may as well tell you now: I don’t watch reality TV… Except Man vs Food, because there is no purer form of entertainment than watching a man slowly kill himself, one bite at a time.

For those of you unfortunate enough to not be familiar with Man vs Food, the premise is simple: Host Adam Richman travels around the country, doing every restaurant food challenge he can find. You know that steakhouse by the Interstate where if you can eat a 72-ounce steak in half an hour you don’t have to pay for it and you get a free hat? That’s Adam Richman’s career.

What I love about this show is the fact that Adam is living my dream. I love food – moreover, I love food that is prepared in such a way that its deliciousness is only matched in how many years it will shave off your life, hence my deep-fried safari to Scotland earlier in the year. However, I’m also trying to live healthier, a lifestyle choice that makes it hard for me to eat anything involving red meat without imagining my innards crying and dreaming of a day when I consume nothing but Edamame beans and tepid water.

Fortunately, I have Adam Richman to show me what life is like for people who have absolutely no common sense when it comes to eating – or, rather, what happens when The Travel Channel pays a person to tie up his common sense, throw it in the trunk of a car, and have Robert Di Nero shoot it like in Goodfellas.

For example, in the most recent episode, Adam goes to a restaurant in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and orders a five pound nacho platter with three different kinds of meat, horrifying amounts of refried beans, and a lava flow of melted cheese, all of which he finished in slightly less than 45 minutes, earning him a free T-shirt.

There is something so quintessentially American about this – one man eating enough junk food to feed an entire village in Mexico, all in the pursuit of a cheap polyester T-shirt, most likely manufactured by starving peasants in the same village in Mexico.

My biggest problem with the show is Adam Richman himself. The only reason I watch the show is because I like food; I feel like that’s the reason why most people watch most food shows. Yet food shows have a solid history of obnoxious hosts – Guy Fieri and Anthony Bourdain are the archetypes, and Adam Richman is well on his way to overtaking them.

Whenever he isn’t stuffing his face with something that looks almost criminally delicious, he’s mugging for the camera, telling jokes or, more often, mimicking fear and anguish as he watches the chef prepare his gargantuan eating challenge. That always sort of pisses me off – insurance risk managers don’t act all scared when they have to determine the liability of a second rate theme park, my Mom doesn’t roll her eyes and gnash her teeth when she’s assigned to a particularly nasty malpractice case, and I usually didn’t quiver in fear whenever I had to assistant edit a three hour long ghost hunt over the summer. I know you’re just trying to be endearing, Adam, but there’s nothing endearing about a guy acting stressed out about the job in which he gets paid ludicrous amounts to travel the country and eat.

Man vs Food has been criticized for being ‘food porn’* - a shameless display of overindulgence and excess. But I say, what’s wrong with a little porn every now and then?

*Mainly by newspapers in England, where excessive eating is looked down upon. Excessive drinking, on the other hand, is widely celebrated there. So you tell me, England – where’s Man vs Alcohol?

My roommates and I watch Man vs Food pretty much whenever we’re in front of the television – between On Demand and the fact that Man vs Food is a big moneymaker for The Travel Channel, it’s basically always on. And while the show is undoubtedly a celebration of excess, to me it’s also sort of a champion of moderation.

Before the challenge, Adam narrates as the camera lovingly pans over the preparation of this unmanageably large feast – a six-pound burrito, or a four pound grilled cheese sandwich, or three pounds of cracked crab – and all of us on the coach collectively moan and talk about how much we wish we had his job.

And then the clock starts and Adam starts eating, shoving this simply gorgeous looking food into his mouth as fast as he can in pursuit of that T-shirt or bumper sticker, a crowd behind him chanting his name. He’s putting away this food so fast he can probably barely even taste it.

As the challenge goes on, Adam inevitably begins to slow down, sweating bullets and clearly fighting off the urge to vomit. And there comes a point, near the end of each challenge, where he looks like hell and he’s still got half a plate of delicious barbecue ribs left, and his entire career is entirely dependent on him eating the rest of them in under ten minutes, and you can see this defeated look in his eyes where he wishes that he had just become a CPA before he dives back in and finishes.

Then, greasy, sweating, bloated, and miserable, he manages a weary smile and mugs for the camera one last time before retreating to his trailer for Man vs Colon, an event which is not televised but must be equally exciting, at least for him.

If anything, this show is anti-gluttony; Fundamentalist Christians may well be behind this whole song and dance, trying to beat the American obesity epidemic by showing us this one man being made to hate his very existence because of too much food.

He’s a regular martyr, that Adam Richman – sacrificing himself on camera every week so that we may one day realize that there is such a thing as too many nachos.

Truman Capps wants Adam Richman to come to Taylor’s Bar and Grill in Eugene to do the ’25 Tacos in 30 Minutes’ challenge, mainly just to see him finish the tacos in 3 minutes and make all the people who’ve lost look stupid.