Food records in the vein of “World’s Largest Hamburger” or “World’s Biggest Kebab” are the stuff of corporate promotions and bored local TV news producers.
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| World’s largest hamburger |
Compared to legitimate world records that document fantastic physical and mental feats of humanity, food records have troubled me for a couple of reasons.
They’re horridly wasteful, for one — think of all the families in poverty who could make more practical use of the 80 pounds of ground beef used for that world-record burger.
Secondly, food records are rarely more than vapid company PR events. Get a dozen employees, throw in some surplus foodstock (which later can be written off from taxes as business expenses), sprinkle with a few local news cameramen, and you’ve just whipped up the perfect, colorful feature story to ship nationwide on syndicated newsfeeds. A food record is just an advertisement masquerading as history.
But I’m not alone in my eye-rolling at the latest “World’s Greatest…” headlines.
Many cultural critics find such news stories symptomatic of American dietary decadence, additional evidence for our fatal fascination with monstrous portions. These Morgan Spurlock acolytes tend to view record-setting dishes through caloric lenses. They tally up how many grams of fat, carbohydrates, and protein are locked up in food-form and then roundly decry the supersized sums.
I think that’s too easy, though. Who wouldn’t think an 800-pound bagel is packed with thousands of carbs? A lot of food equals a lot of calories – duh.
So when I saw a BusinessWire press release heralding Coca-Cola’s joint creation of the World’s Largest Ice Cream Float with Edy’s Ice Cream this past Friday, I tried a different perspective.
I examined the sugary stunt from a student’s standpoint: just how much did all of this crap cost?
The float was constructed in a 15-foot-tall glass, according to the press release, and required 2,850 gallons of soda (Vanilla Coke).
Soda is sold most economically in two-liter bottles; that is, the average consumer is going to get the most soda for the least money with the greatest ease by purchasing soda this way. For a reason I have yet to discover, our pounds-and-inches nation seems to use metrics only for selling soda, so I must convert gallons to liters to find out how many bottles of Coke 2,850 gallons represent.
That much soda is equal to 5,395 standard two-liter bottles. At Harris Teeter prices, the float uses $9,118 worth of Vanilla Coke.
Now for the ice cream, which the press release said amounted to 7,200 scoops.
How many scoops are in a half gallon of ice cream, the standard supermarket unit of Edy’s? There is unfortunately no simple conversion here, for scoops vary widely in size. They are coded, however, with a system based on the diameter of the scoop bowl, which I am estimating as a rather average two-and-a-half inches.
A cooking reference shows that such a scoop could dip into a tub of Edy’s about 12 times without coming up empty. Do the math, and those 7,200 scoops come out to about 600 half-gallon cartons.
I turn again to Harris Teeter for pricing. Edy’s retails there for $5.29, so the float required $3,174 worth of ice cream.
All in all, this world record-setting ice cream float would cost me almost $12,300 to duplicate in my backyard. And that doesn’t include sales tax, transportation costs, or the steep price of angry neighbors’ stares I’m sure I would receive for attracting legions of winged insect pests.
What might a more practical student buy with the money? I could dine on ramen noodles (Top Ramen, not the contemptible Maruchan brand) three times a day well into my silver-haired retirement were I limited to a food budget of $12,300. Or I could afford to attend Columbia for a little more than 26 days, from the first day of classes in September until October 1.
Even more intellectually respectable, I could copy — by hand — Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment more than 1,400 times onto the reams of notebook paper I could purchase with the ice cream float funds.
It’s not going to give me a better understanding of Raskolnikov’s criminal mind, but the task would certainly cast a new light on what Dostoyevsky meant by “punishment.”
Coca-Cola’s public relations stunt has little more purpose than any of these spending alternatives. All are silly exercises in numbers, but Coke’s float is the shrewdest, cleverest application for the money.
88 newspapers and television stations provided coverage to the world-record event, a Google News search reports. That’s 88 different commercials, 88 different opportunities to advertise soda. Inches upon inches of newsprint column space and minutes of uninterrupted TV broadcast airtime, all dedicated to discussing Vanilla Coke. I can’t even begin to calculate how much a company would have to spend for comparable amounts of legitimate advertising.
Perhaps the old saying is true — you really can’t buy publicity like this. You have to cheat for it.
