This Food Makes Me Sick

Hungry?

Perhaps I can interest you in some pizza?  Maybe follow that up with a sundae or a fruitcake?  How about a martini to go with that?  And later, if you're still hungry, a bagel for a snack?

Sound good?

Your bill comes to $1,688,000.  Will you be paying with a cashier's check?  

The income disparity between the rich and the poor in this country continues to grow.  

[N]ew data also shows that the top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Per person, the top group received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980.

Now, things are not all roses if you're rich.  You've got problems that the poor rabble cannot possibly understand.  But try to imagine it, if you can.  

You're the son of a poor company executive who only makes a few million dollars a year.  But you understand that opportunities are not given -- they are taken.  So, true to your conservative principles, you pull yourself up by the bootstraps and with only your wits, your family's name, your father's connections, and a generous donation, you manage to get into an Ivy League university.  You could have given up there, but did you?  NO!  Equipped with nothing more than your Ivy League diploma, your incredible business acumen, and your amazing business and management skills, you somehow are able to land a job as a VP of your father's company.  

What a testament you are to America, the Land of Opportunity!

You could now coast through your life, if you wanted to, with a high six figure salary and stock options.  But you're a go-getter!  And when your father decides it's time for him to retire, he chooses YOU to fill his shoes over all the other qualified candidates... PROOF of your amazing business abilities!

Well, a few years later, maybe you're running that company into the dirt as fast as you can, but damned if there aren't 8 zeros on your paycheck.  But now you've got another problem.  Namely, this:  When you're worth more than a billion dollars, how do you communicate that to the commoners?

One way to do that is to waste your money extravagantly, to buy things that show people that you could spend their entire annual salary in one day and not blink an eyelash.  A good way to do that is with ridiculously expensive food:

• A bagel at the Westin Hotel in Manhattan which costs $1000.  It is topped with Italian cream cheese, white truffles, and goji berry jelly with edible gold leaves.
• A pizza called the Luxury Pizza.  It's a 12 inch "thin crust topped with [six different kinds of] caviar, lobster, creme fraiche and chives."  Price:  $1,000.
• The Golden Opulence Sundae also sports a $1,000 price tag.  It's served in a crystal goblet with a golden spoon, and features "5 scoops of the richest Tahitian vanilla bean ice cream infused with Madagascar vanilla and covered in 23K edible gold leaf, covered in the world's most expensive chocolate and stuffed with candied fruits from Paris, gold leaf, truffles, Marzipan cherries and topped with a bowl of Grand Passion caviar."
• The Algonquin Hotel in NYC offers the $10,000 Martini on the Rock, which is a martini made with Belvedere vodka and Martini & Rossi vermouth, with a diamond in the martini glass.
• Another sundae, called the Frrozen Haute Chocolate, will set you back $25,000.  As a point of reference, half of all Americans made less than $24,325 in 2006.  The sundae is made with "a blend of 28 cocoas, including 14 of the most expensive and exotic from around the globe".  It is "infused with 5 grams of edible 23-karat gold and served in a goblet lined with edible gold. At the base of the goblet is an 18-karat gold bracelet with 1 carat of white diamonds."  To top it off:  "whipped cream covered with more gold and a side of La Madeline au Truffle from Knipschildt Chocolatier, which sells for $2,600 a pound.  It is eaten with a gold spoon decorated with white and chocolate-colored diamonds".  IRONY:  The place that served this was shut down for health concerns.
• And finally, we have the Diamond Fruitcake.  As best I can tell, it's a regular goddamned fruitcake with the exception of being very pretty, and also very sparkly because it has 223 diamonds stuck into its surface.  It was made in Tokyo in 2005 and is probably still being regifted by rich people this year.  It had a price tag of $1,650,000.

According to NPR's Hunger in America series, 38.2 million people (12.9% of the overall population of the United States) are considered "food insecure", which is a nice euphemistic way of saying "too poor to eat".  And that's just in the United States.  The worldwide problem is much greater, with 25,000 people actually dying of hunger every DAY, usually children, often in developing nations in Africa and southeast Asia.  

"Ten men in our country could buy the whole world and ten million can't buy enough to eat."  - Will Rogers

I have to wonder, with the kind of poverty and hunger we're seeing both at home and around the world, if it's too much to ask for a person to skip the caviar, lobster, and gold leaf pizza, get Pizza Hut or Papa John's instead, and take the leftover $985 and do something good with it.  

If YOU were just about to order that $1,000 bagel, might I interest you in one of these from our menu, instead?  

America's Second Harvest
UNICEF
The Hunger Project
World Food Programme
Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE)
Oxfam International