Eating gingerbread men out of house and home
So there I was, just a little bit more than halfway through eating one of the sections of gingerbread house roof, and I knew I could not continue. It’s not that my stomach was full; far from it. It was much worse than that.
A gingerbread house eating competition had seemed like a good idea. For better or for worse, I started a tradition at our company of having regular eating competitions. Call it morale building. Some of the competitions went well, like the Chipotle burrito contest and the Chick Fil A nuggets contest. Others didn’t go so well, like the Popeye’s fried chicken contest (it caused some intestinal difficulties) or the pumpkin pie contest (the pumpkiny taste quickly became nauseating in large quantities). But none was uniquely so bad as the gingerbread eating competition.
It started out so well, too. We had four teams of two competing with each other to build the best house in thirty minutes, as judged by our lawyer, office manager, and president (no, really). My team wasn’t the one that ended up winning, but it was still a good time, with everyone from the office clustered around the table in the common area, cracking jokes, drinking eggnog, and generally having a good time. Most of us had never built a gingerbread house before (some had never even seen one in real life), so we were having far too much fun gluing gingerbread walls together with frosting and decorating with gum drops and candies for the grown men and women that we are supposed to be.
But after the building was finished was when it all went to hell. Four of us brave souls stayed on to eat to the ground the houses we had so lovingly built. That was the theory, anyway. None of us got farther than one half of the roof. It was nasty. After the first three bites I already knew it was a terrible idea, but I kept going for awhile after that lest I show weakness in front of the others. You’d think some candy is good, so more candy is better, but noooooo. As I made steady progress on the first sheet of roof, consuming nauseating bite after bite of gingerbread slathered in doughy frosting, sweet candies, and chewy gumdrops, my mind started hearkening back to the idyllic days of yore; anything to divert attention from the ongoing gustatory tragedy.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. The gingerbread kits we bought (weighing in at 4.1 pounds each) came with hidden hazards. Some of what we thought was edible candy turned out to be gum balls. Thankfully, we contestants reached an agreement that the gum balls could be removed from the houses before eating, lest we have to choke down the gum as well. But we didn’t reach such an agreement on the hard candies. Note the emphasis. Hard. Very hard. Like jawbreaker-hard.
You’d be biting through a sheet of chewy, yet easily masticated, gingerbread and gumdrops only to come across a pellet of buckshot masquerading as a candy attempting to fracture your teeth. It was the most enamel-threatening eating contest we had ever embarked upon. Whoever the hell decided to put miniature jawbreakers in a gingerbread house prefab kit obviously never considered the possible ramifications if one were to be used in an eating competition. What a harrowing oversight that turned out to be.
Even after we all gave up, and the one amongst us who ate a whole half of his roof was declared victorious, the bad times were only just beginning. Eating a boatload of sugar and nothing else for lunch, it turns out, is a genuinely bad idea. In hindsight, I recall my mom warning me about this kind of thing during my youth, but I was never so foolish as to attempt it until now. We all experienced sugar highs that lasted about an hour and a half, getting us so hopped up we were unable to concentrate on our work. If I develop diabetes, this is going to be the pivotal moment I look back at and say, “That was what did it!” Then, after the sugar high came the sugar crash. One of our number left home early in search of real food, completely unable to function any further at work. The rest of us suffered and agonized through it.
I was in the unenviable position of simultaneously feeling the lingering effects of the sugar crash and being incredibly hungry to boot (in my ingeniousness, I had forgone lunch in the naive hope of being able to pack in more gingerbread). So I went over to McDonald’s for some food to satiate my hunger and stabilize my energy levels. It was the first time that I ever felt really healthy while eating McDonald’s food. Compared to the pure sugar of a gingerbread house, even eating the spongy, processed chicken (?) in McNuggets felt like guzzling from the fountain of life. It’s got protein. It’s what bodies crave.
I hear rumors that next we’re going to tackle either bananas or one pound Fuddrucker’s burgers. I say bring it on. We can handle it. Nothing will ever be as bad as our gingerbread experience. Nothing can ever be as bad for our productivity, either. Although everyone else had a whale of a good time assembling the houses and watching on in bemused amusement, we competitive office eaters on the front lines of culinary warfare suffered through the worst of it. And war is hell. But now we will live on, forever enshrined in our officemates’ memories as the Greatest Eating Generation. Although we sacrificed so much, we all emerged victorious in the end.
December 18th, 2007 at 00:07
Banana eating competitions are a BAD idea. Not only can you get the runs something fierce from them, but there’s a real risk of hyperkalemia leading to permanent paralysis. Just say no.