Eat till you drop

1"You're killing me here," the sparkplug owner says, flexing those aching wrists.

Click goes the camera.

"OK, I gotta take a break."

What's hurting her is four kilograms of burger, plus 50 slices of bacon, 50 slabs of cheese, relish, tomatoes and what looks to be at least a whole onion, sandwiched between three giant buns. This is the burger that made Blondie's famous and it's the burger Doyle is hoisting now for a photographer's lens.

It's also the largest burger one can buy in Winnipeg -- as long as you order at least 24 hours in advance. In September, Blondie's will be featured on a Canadian edition of the show Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. Once, one random dude turned to another random dude in the jungles of Nicaragua and said, "I wish I was at Blondie's right now."

What draws people to tackle this beef behemoth and the others Doyle serves up, ordered by weight?

Maybe it's pure gluttony. How could anything so good be bad?

OK, yeah, it's a sin.

One of the seven deadly sins, in fact, though (contrary to popular opinion) it's not listed as such in the Bible. Christian tradition embraced the "sins" later and with a sometimes peculiar level of zeal: For instance, in defining gluttony, St. Thomas Aquinas didn't just condemn eating wildly and greedily, but also eating too daintily (huh?) and too soon.

But surely, we can agree on this: People like to eat. A lot. Sometimes it's deliciously decadent. Sometimes it's just a disaster.

Each year, Canadians consume almost 58 litres of milk per person and five litres of ice cream. We fish one million tonnes of seafood.

We don't eat almost 30 per cent of the calories we buy, letting the rest spoil on the shelves or feed the landfill seagulls.

In Winnipeg, a city of a thousand restaurants, this kind of decadence is everywhere. Big sells here: not just Blondie's king-sized burger, but the Ham-N-Eggs Grill's three-patty monster. At Johnny's Restaurant on Marion, you can order a Fat Boy with as many patties as you please.

At pricier joints, total caloric decadence comes when opulent food dresses up blue-collar classics. At Oui Bistro in the Exchange, that old Canadian fave, poutine, is jazzed up with a slab of seared foie gras; at Terrace Fifty-Five in Assiniboine Park, you can nosh a lobster and shrimp corn dog, or a lobster pot pie.

You might think Homo sapiens are a ravenous bunch, consuming everything in their path, so long as it tastes good.

You wouldn't be entirely wrong. At the University of Manitoba, Prof. Linda Wilson teaches a fourth-year course on the psychology of food and eating. It's an academic course, but Wilson also dispenses practical advice to students: namely, if you want to throw a party without breaking the bank, limit the diversity of your dishes. Guests will eat less. "It's related to a phenomenon that's well-researched, called sensory-specific satiety," Wilson says. "You could also refer to this as the smorgasbord phenomenon."

Translation: Hard-wired in our biology is a hunger for diverse foods. When there are lots of options, we gobble it up. But when there are only a few plates to pick from, our senses get bored of the taste and texture of the food. We lose interest and our hunger. (Maybe that's why nobody has yet to single-handedly conquer the Blondie's burger.)

There's more to stuffing your face, though, than just diversity. People make careers studying the myriad interactions between food and synapse firing, and food and culture. At the University of Calgary, Prof. Josephine Smart was invited to work with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control thanks to her work, which explored how eating what a culture sees as "exotic" or rare animals directly translates to social status.

Maybe that's why the U.S. government recently busted a swanky California sushi bar for serving meat from an endangered whale. Or why the majestic bluefin tuna has been sliced, diced and sashimi'd near the point of oblivion, all to feed the maw of a $7.2-billion bluefin tuna industry. No number of warnings from scientists about rapidly nearing extinction has left a sour taste in our mouths: The disastrously over-hunted fish still turns up on plates at some Winnipeg restaurants.

This is the ugly side of gluttony.

But let's go back to that giant, juicy burger. The walls at Blondie's are lined with pictures of people right before they attempt to conquer the giant burger. (If they eat it in under two hours, it's free.) It happens about once every two weeks. The men in the photos -- the four-kilogram aspirants are always men, Doyle says -- wear the same expression: a rictus of absolute terror hidden under the glaze of bravado. "Guys want to do it themselves," Doyle says. "They come in and say silly things like 'Oh, I can eat 100 perogies.' Well, it's not the same thing.

"So they come in with their friends, and their friends all order a little tiny burger, and a quarter of the way through they're just green... and I have to say, 'Ok, you're done.' So it's totally ego."

One guy almost finished the thing. Almost. And he even walked out, whereas most, Doyle says, have to be lifted.

She's lifted a lot of guys out of there. Doyle opened Blondie's 20 years ago as what she calls "a normal restaurant." But "one day, I just got bored," she says, holding court over the red-and-white checkered tablecloths that dot her diner-that-time-forgot decor. "I started seeing how big I could make them and still flip them."

And so, you order burgers at Blondie's by weight -- from those "little tiny" quarter-pounders to that unholy four-kilogram beast.

Mmmm, delicious gluttony.

Don't worry, St. Thomas Aquinas. We won't be eating that bad boy too daintily. And we definitely won't eat it too quickly; but as for too greedily?

No promises here.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 23, 2010 A6