If there is one thing I can appreciate, it is dedication to the craft of food preparation. Certainly the taste of food is the most important thing, but when combined with the extra layer of attentive detail, the experience can really be inspiring.

One of the reasons I love sushi is because it often combines these two qualities: taste and attention to presentation.

Therefore, I am especially excited about a movie coming out next month called Jiro Dreams of Sushi, about the world’s best sushi chef.

The focus of the movie is 85-year-old Jiro Ono, who runs a tiny counter in a Tokyo subway station. How word got out on him, I will never know. What I do know is that this man takes his work to a whole other level.

The movie comes out in March, and I will be there… then shortly thereafter, a So Good field trip to Tokyo – because I’ll go that far for my readers.

The trailer:

H/t to Tasting Table for the tip and to Eater for the pic.

As you sit down to a table full of wings, chips, burgers and dips this SuperBowl Sunday, imagine being able to devour truck loads of these delicious items as a profession. Glamor, prestige & unlimited wet naps could be yours right?

Meet Crazy Legs Conti;  a man with one lofty goal in life. His dream? To one day become the epitome of guilt free gluttony by ruling the world of competitive eating circuits in the Good Old U S of A.

Years ago when the Fox network was starved for ratings (pun intended) and didn’t have twenty nights of American Idol programming, they would slap just about anything on the air. This was a magic time for lowest common denominator programming as “When Animals Attack”, “When Good Pets Go Bad” and “Man VS. Beast” flourished.

One of the last straws to break the good will camels back via this genre onslaught for Fox was the Glutton Bowl. A reality game show sanctioned  by the International Federation of Competitive Eating.  Let’s be honest here; any organization that has a soft serve cone as part of their official crest is too legit to quit.

Each episode was bulging with professional eaters being challenged to down whatever was placed in front of them. Butter. Miracle Whip, Vienna Sausages, Hobos.

Ok, ok I kid; there weren’t any competitions that involved Vienna Sausages.

While the Glutton Bowl only lasted as a two hour marathon of excess one classy night, mostly for concern that a regular series would result in the majority of repeat contestants dying from blocked arteries, the good old Yankee tradition of eating ones self to death carried forward with unwavering enthusiasm.

Crazy Legs’ journey to become a spokesperson for the world of competitive eating is not a pretty one my friends. That being said, it’s hard not to like this amiable scarfer and his die hard,  East meets West philosophy as it applies to the honed craft of consuming mass quantities of food in horrifyingly short amounts of time. He wields the same passion of any other seasoned athlete, who can inhale fourteen dozen oysters in under ten minutes.

You’ll feel little guilt as you cheer Conti on in his quest as he possesses a superhuman kind of freakish Jughead metabolism that keeps him comfortably away from obesity. A trait that the majority of champion human Hoovers seem to be blessed with.

Just to give you a better idea of what kind of sweet cash you can make with such a lucrative career path,  Crazy Legs makes ends meet by washing windows, posing nude for art classes and sharing a 20 square foot apartment with a surly Art student who seems to semi tolerate his non-stop binging practice sessions.

Travel with Conti to every backwoods, blue collar, get stabbed in an alleyway eating event as he crisscrosses the Country looking to build his reputation at regional events. His eye on the prize? First place at the Nathan’s Hot Dog eating contest. The culmination of the contests of speed and minimal chewing build to an epic showdown between Crazy Legs & his only true competition; 112 pound Champ Takeru Kobayash.

Kobayashi can eat one hotdog every 12 seconds with a patented double break and water soak approach. Once properly drenched in liquid, it’s argued if he actually chews the hot-dog but instead swallows them whole much like a boa constrictor. However a bit faster and with far less grace. In fact, watching a long line of grown, sweaty men stuff themselves silly with wet buns and tube steak is sometimes hard to watch.

Does Crazy Legs stand a chance?

A thoroughly enjoyable documentary that allows you a very unglamorous at times, inside look at the world of competitive eating. Crazy Legs deliciously enthusiastic passion for what he considers a legitimate sport makes for a fascinating view. It’ll leave you craving more.

Hot Dogs? Not so much.

I myself am a HUGE pomegranate fan, drinking POM wonderful juice with some regularity and buying pomegranates whenever they are in season. So I linked up with POM Wonderful to help get the word out about the film. They’ve been kind enough to give So Good three coupons for a bottle of free pomegranate juice. For a chance to win these coupons, leave a comment telling me what you’ve heard about the movie, if you’ve seen it or what seems most interesting about it to you. You can also enter to win a bunch of prizes on their website, including a Mini-Cooper & Home Theater system.

Here’s a clip from the film in which Spurlock knocks the deceptive marketing by other juice companies offering “Pomegranate Juice” that actually contains extremely small amounts of Pomegranate juice:

The film’s website describes the documentary as a film that:

Lifts the veil on our nation’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government’s regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation’s food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment.

The film addresses the issues of genetic engineering, cloning, farm worker protection, environmental impact, factory farming, pesticides and healthy eating.

We talk a lot here at So Good about fast food companies, and frequently I’m writing about food products that are about as unhealthy as it gets – I recognize this, and just because I write about something does not mean I’m endorsing it or encouraging you to eat it.  The bottom line is that So Good looks at the world of food through the angle of what products are the most absurd, and what marketing campaigns are the most interesting. Since a lot of fast food is incredibly unhealthy and unnecessary for people to buy, these companies work extra hard to create absurd new products and creative new marketing strategies – which, in turn, makes it more interesting for me to write about.

I’m certainly not a vegetarian, and I will mock the organic/eat local/save the world people when their rhetoric gets too silly not to be mocked, but the fact of the matter is that these issues are important to me, and they should be important to you.  I feel relatively powerless as just one consumer, but I would love to see a massive cultural shift in the way our country approaches eating, food and the food industry. There are so many better safeguards our government can put in place, and there are  many buying habits that American consumers can change.

The bottom line is that Americans eat crap, and a lot of it. Whether it be foods that are high in fat, overly processed, or full of chemicals. We are incredibly disconnected from our food supply, and many people LIKE living in ignorance, fearing they wouldn’t want to eat their favorite foods anymore if they knew how it was produced.  It should be a major goal of our country to change our eating habits no matter how much pressure we get from big agri-business or the major food companies.  I’m not advocating taking away the choice of consumers to eat whatever the hell they want, but education can go a long way towards motivating people to, on their own, make wiser choices.  In many ways, the health and the lives of our citizens depends on it.

Check out the Food Inc. trailer below.  Hopefully this film will make its way to DC at some point soon.

H/T to Cold Mud for the trailer.

I just got back from a midnight showing of Batman:The Dark Knight. (Which, I might add for my readers, was dope, dope, dope. Go see it. And I’m not just saying that because I have a giant asexual crush on Christopher Nolan and every movie he makes).

Prior to the movie beginning, I had a craving, as I often do at movie theaters, for the delectable sweet & sour flavor of Sour Patch Kids. So I went to the concession stand and said “Sour Patch Kids please.” Did they say, “sorry we don’t have those, but we do have Sour Jacks”? No. Instead, they just handed me the Sour Jacks as if they were simply the same thing. If I’m going to pay $4 for a bag of candy, it damn well better be the actual candy I want.

Now some of you candy purchasers over at AMC are probably thinking, “well Sour Jacks are similar enough to Sour Patch Kids, what’s this candy elitist complaining about?” Uh, no, they aren’t. If you think that they are, you clearly do not have a discerning palate when it comes to sour gummy candies. Because quite frankly, compared to Sour Patch Kids, Sour Jacks are liking eat a handful of horseshit.

YES!

No!

Fortunately for you, AMC, I was so riveted by Batman that 3 minutes into the movie I forgot I was even holding Sour Jacks, and didn’t eat any of them after the movie started. I’ll let you slide this time AMC, but only because it’s 3:45 am and I’m still jacked up on energy from the movie. But I’ll be watching you AMC, I’ll be watching.

Love always,

So Good

The documentary stars stand-up comedian and former health writer Tom Naughton. The premise, as described on the film’s website, is as follows:

“Have you seen the news stories about the obesity epidemic? Did you see Super Size Me? Then guess what? … You’ve been fed a load of bologna. Tom Naughton replies to the blame-McDonald’s crowd by losing weight on a fat-laden fast-food diet while demonstrating that nearly everything we’ve been told about obesity and healthy eating is wrong.”

Naughton is out to prove that carbs, not fat, are the true culprit, and that many of the facts our government has told us about health are false (example: low-fat diets aren’t healthy, in fact, they can lead to diabetes and depression). Tom eats an all fast food, high-fat, low carb diet for 28 days…and loses weight in the process. The Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb blog I mentioned earlier has an interview with Naughton, and you can check out a preview of the movie below:

“Hands down my favourite fast-food chain is the In-N-Out Burger. The double double with cheese is one of the great food experiences. It’s like naughty sex. Bruce Willis even admitted he doesn’t eat fast food anymore, except from In-N-Out Burger.”

I love naughty sex, and of course I love cheeseburgers. But why do I have to settle for one or the other on any given night? How much longer until I find my soulmate…a woman who wants to have rampant, wild and naughty sex but also follow it up with a post-coitus cheeseburger?

This increase in traffic was driven by the company’s advertising tie-in with the Simpsons Movie. During the month of July, Burger King’s website attracted a stunning 4.2 million unique visitors, an increase of 774% over their traffic in June.

Whoever it was at Burger King who decided to partner with the Simpsons Movie for a summer advertising campaign needs a promotion.