Say No to Elitist Food Fascism

The other night I had on some bullshit Travel Channel special about food. They went to several different restaurants where some crazy old bastard or pervy looking Midwesterner supposedly made the best *insert food here* in the world. Talk about delusions of grandeur.

A few people in particular pissed me off. There’s just something infuriating about some asshole taking food so seriously. There was one place in Chicago with hot dogs so great, the owner of the place gets upset if you call them hot dogs. Excuse the fuck out of me. I didn’t realize calling a rocket dog (or something equally stupid) a hot dog was enough to agitate a grown man. And heaven help you if you want to put ketchup on your rocket dog. At this particular establishment ketchup is strictly forbidden. Really? Just to warn you ahead of time, if I want ketchup on my hot dog, it will be physically impossible for you to stop me from using ketchup, and if you try I will kick your ass so severely your children will die.

Three separate restaurants forbade the use of ketchup on their specialty food. A burger place, the hot dog place, and a French fry place all strictly enforce anti-ketchup rules. What’s with all this anti-ketchup sentiment? What a bunch of dicks. If I ever wind up at one of these places, I’m bringing my own ketchup and putting it on everything. The customer is always right dickholes, and if you forget that I’ll remind you with a size 12 ½ leather boot suppository.

Then there were these hokey rednecks who all claimed to have the best barbecue. They all had a top secret barbecue sauce recipe too. Of course, none of these inbred yokels would divulge their secret sauce recipes. Every one of them had some secret ingredient they credited their sauce’s flavor to. When asked what that ingredient might be, the typical clichéd to death response was, “I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you.” Just who the fuck thinks this tired response is still funny anyway?

I really got a kick out of the Philly Steak Sandwich debacle. Somewhere in Philadelphia there are two steak sandwich places in close proximity to one another and both claim to have the best Philly Cheesesteaks. These obnoxious sandwich peddlers are essentially feuding over this bullshit. Both places have fiercely loyal patrons who from time to time beat the shit out of each other. While I am amused by the senseless violence, I am still enraged by the presumptuous sandwich slingers.

One of the sandwich places takes their sandwich so seriously, if you don’t order your food exactly right, they send you to the back of the line and you have to try it again. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I am at a point in my life where I refuse to let some sweaty sandwich salesman tell me what to do. If you don’t like the way I order a sandwich, tough shit. I don’t like the way you smell, but I’m not going to force you to bathe regularly. If you look me in the eye and seriously tell me to go to the back of the line over some stupid terminology dispute, you’ll be lucky if I don’t hop over the counter and wail on you with a tire iron. You may have some uppity notion about the quality of your food, but I have a bad attitude and that shit doesn’t impress me.

Point is, taking food so seriously that you become a snob is gay. I’ll lick cigarette butts out of the gutter before I drop my head and submit to elitist food Fascism.