Remember that clip of a completely obliterated David Hasselhoff eating a burger on the floor of a Las Vegas hotel room? Of course you do. It was the most painful video filmed by the daughter of an international star and then posted on the Internet, like, ever. If you found the image of your Baywatch hero slurring into some reconstituted meat too painful and you’ve blocked it out, it looked something like this:
Pretty epic.
But, in the same way that we would be lying if we said we didn’t rummage through friends’ bathroom cabinets whilst using their toilet, we would be lying if we said we haven’t all done a David Hasselhoff.
Come on. Tell Aunty Beck. You know you have. When you get home from a night out with a hunger that could extinguish entire species? When the only course of action is to lie with your face in the fridge, or to climb into the condiment cupboard and just open your mouth until you’ve absorbed everything, like one of those speeded-up sciencey videos of insects devouring a piece of fruit? You know what I’m talking about.
Yes, there is undoubtedly a gratuitous indignity of shoving your silly drunken face into a cling-filmed block of stilton, but let’s look at it another way. How about the glorious, unadulterated, uninhibited freedom of it! At what other point in your day-to-day life can you really throw all moral, social, personal, and hygienic caution to the wind and just pig the hell out? There are no ‘If I eat half that Sara Lee chocolate gateau it’ll definitely go straight to my hips and I’ll be left with an acute feeling of self-disgust’ worries here. Quite the contrary: your brain is saying ‘I must eat half that Sara Lee chocolate gateau. I need it. If I don’t eat half that Sara Lee chocolate gateau something awful will happen. It is my duty to eat half that Sara Lee chocolate gateau.’
And what of culinary conventions? Those suffocating dictations that tell you it is not appropriate to make a sandwich of hot buttered toast filled with Coco Pops, or that it is unseemly – depraved, even – to eat a can of cold rice pudding using a Kit Kat as a spoon? In a fit of drunken eating you can shun such stifling conventions! Stand up for what is good and true! Open that tin of sardines and that jar of peanut butter, consume the two with the same spoon, and to hell with the consequences!
Drunken eating makes food fun. Small conquests are made. It becomes paramount that you must seek out all of the sultanas in your box of Sultana Bran. You can spend whole minutes staring into a flaky brown utopia, exclaiming ‘Aha!’ when you spy one of the sneaky little buggers, fish it out with your sweaty drunken fingers, consume it, and the search continues. Do you want a packet of sultanas? No, you do not want a packet of sultanas! You want the thrill of the chase, the glory of the conquest! You want to fundamentally transform the very essence of this product: you have the power to turn it from ‘Sultana Bran’ to simply ‘Bran’! You are God!
So do not be ashamed next time you find yourself with your head inside a chicken carcass at half past one in the morning. You are only doing what is right. You, and David Hasselhoff, are merely obeying nature’s natural order. Run with it. Enjoy it. Create. Experiment. Who says sliced ham doesn’t go with chocolate spread? You are your own man.
I would like to conclude by stating that I have never indulged in such drunken eating behaviour, and I certainly didn’t do it when I got home at half past two this morning.
BECKY SAYS THINGS 