We must confess that we’re a bit surprised that the average Brit doesn’t weigh 25 stone, which in Real Amurriccan math is 350 pounds. Our surprise is based on what we’ve observed in commercials on the telly, which as everyone knows are accurate depictions of everyday life in every country outside North Korea, which doesn’t have commercials, because they’re godless communists.
A good example is one commercial we’ve watched around two hundred times — and we haven’t even been here in London for a week yet — mainly because we don’t have a DVR, and we have to actually sit through the commercials. This is a situation not altogether dissimilar to living in North Korea, that godless commie hellhole. We shouldn’t be shocked by this advert, since at home, in the States, we’ve seen, while fast forwarding through the commercials — as the good Lord and the TiVo engineers intended — advertisements for things like Pizza Hut stuffed crust pizza. We thought the Pizza Hut commercials had inured us to anything one could do to an ostensible foodstuff, but then we arrived in England.
And here we discovered that Pizza Hut UK has far surpassed the clumsy efforts of their American brethren. Here they don’t just have pizza crust stuffed with cheese, they’ve gone one (or eleven) better and introduced crusts stuffed with hot dogs. Yes, hot dogs, hot dogs. I repeat, pizza stuffed with hot dogs. It’s the End Times, folks, dogs living with cats, Democrats marrying Republicans, Yankee fans, well, being Yankee fans, because that’s never gonna change.
Gaze upon the horror, mortal!
And that commercial? The one I was talking about a few paragraphs back? The one that I’ve seen a few hundred times? It was for Philly brand cream cheese and it presents a short morality play wherein the Hapless Dad is left alone to feed the progeny while the 21st Century Mom is out scouring the business world for fat paychecks. Hapless Dad decides to smear a bunch of cream cheese on a raw chicken breast fillet, and wrap it in bacon, and bake for twenty minutes. Sounds awful, doesn’t it?
And yet people here don’t all weigh in at north of a zillion pounds. They may be a bit overweight, but they actually have to walk everywhere, so they work off some of those hot dog filled pizza calories. Then there’s the stairs, so many stairs, since it’s hard to redo everything to make it compliant with the Americans with Disability Act, since: 1) much of the architecture is old, and often doesn’t lend itself to the inclusion of ramps and stuff, and; 2) this isn’t America, a fact that does seem to come as a surprise to some American tourists.
Anyway, we have several more months to explore what the British are doing to their food, so hopefully I should have more tales to amaze and astonish.