By SETH BARNEs
FOR MANY, THE BEGINNING OF baseball season is a time of celebration. Spring is with us and we’re young once again. The sights, sounds and textures of the game remind us of life’s simple pleasures. The crack of a bat, a ball arching high against the cobalt evening sky. Pristine, freshly mowed outfield grass. A runner rounding third and barreling towards home. Eating so many hot dogs and nachos you require a Life Flight to the nearest hospital.
What, you haven’t heard of the All-You- Can-Eat Pavilion at Dodger Stadium? Maybe you thought food and beverage were still a supplementary part of the major league baseball experience. Well, you’re wrong. For those inclined towards gluttony, it can be the main event. This season, the Los Angeles Dodgers have turned their Right Field Pavilion into an all-you-can-eat-section. For $35, the ticket-holder is allowed unfettered access to all the hot dogs, nachos, peanuts, popcorn and Coke they can handle. Beer isn’t included in the deal, but when you’re drunk on Dodger Dogs, who needs suds? This fine dining menu is available one and a half hours before game time and ends two hours into the game, meaning you have nearly four hours to become part of America’s obesity epidemic. Eat up!
Overeating, unhealthy dietary practices and childhood obesity have become easy targets in the news media. You can barely go a day without hearing about some study or other talking up the expanding waistlines and escalating health costs associated with our country’s obsession with chowing down. There’s a lot of sanctimony tinged with fire and brimstone in these reports, and the underlying message is clear: In this land of plenty, we’re so well-off, and so oblivious to the struggles and plight of the less fortunate that we revel in our excess, plying ourselves with food and drink in a vain quest for contentment. We fill ourselves up on food because we’re spiritually bankrupt. An extra large popcorn could feed an entire family in Sub-Saharan Africa; here, it’s just an appetizer for Little Johnny before he attempts to eat an armload of hot dogs before the 7th-inning stretch.
It’s increasingly obvious to me that obesity news propagated by the media isn’t exactly reaching the vox populi. Maybe we’re all a little too occupied watching extreme sports bloopers on YouTube, but I haven’t noticed many people changing their eating habits because some airbrushed broadcast journalist decided he was going to finally inform the public-at-large of their hideous and self-destructive problem with food.
While McDonald’s has thrown a few extra salads onto their menu (granted, you probably can douse them in Buttermilk Bacon Ranch dressing if you please), I haven’t noticed fast food outlets making an about-change in their menu offerings. As good capitalists, I’m sure they’d make changes in the direction of healthy offerings if the demand were there.
It isn’t. As you can see, I’m somewhat on the fence with this one. I think it’s absurdly humorous that such a thing as the All-You- Can-Eat-Pavilion exists, but I’d also probably bristle at a typical mailed-in news report on how the program represents the downfall of Western Civilization. Does our country have problems with material excess and consumerism? Yes, probably. But are these problems a part of the general human condition? I think so. They represent a telling irony: The more you have, the more you consume (materially and gastronomically), the less “filled-up” you actually are. Short-term pleasures aren’t lasting and don’t add up to anything substantial. Well, except maybe a bulging gut.
So I’d encourage one and all to head to the right field stands on an empty stomach. Feasting and baseball are America’s two great pastimes and this is a terrific opportunity to engage each of them in one swoop.
And if somebody looks down on you for your indulgence, just squirt mustard in their eye.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 12, 2007. Read the original PDF.