And Now We Shall Do Manly Things (9 page)

When I say that Barrett owners are an enthusiast cult, I mean it quite literally. Owning and firing a Barrett requires a sort of religious fervor. In part, this is because the weapon has absolutely no practical use. It fires a round designed to inflict a ridiculous amount of damage from marathon distances. No, not exactly marathon, but I've seen plenty of TV shows featuring the gun being fired accurately around a mile from the target. Barrett rifles weigh so much that they have to be fired while lying down, with a bipod beneath the barrel and a monopod beneath the shoulder stock. They are bulky and absolutely wicked looking. Not to mention, expensive. A base-model Barrett .50-cal will run you $5,000. The semiautomatic versions are twice that. And, unlike the fine English shotguns, they lack almost any sign of fineness. No hand-carved wood, no neatly etched steel. These are brutes, the Hummer of the gun world. The rounds they fire are more than twice the size of anything I have ever shot, and each bullet will cost you a dollar or more every time you pull the trigger.

I can't say I was surprised that the Barrett was Uncle Mark's lottery gun. After all, he's the gun owner who has owned just about everything else, so the .50-cal was his Everest. What I was surprised by was the gun itself. What the hell would someone need one of these things for anyway? I suppose if there was a building up the road that was leering menacingly at your begonias you might want one, or if, say, a race of superaliens invaded Earth in fifty-foot-tall spaceships that stayed conspicuously far away—then, it might come in handy. But this thing would turn a deer to dust. It would vaporize a woodchuck, and one has a hard time imagining a situation in which it would be practical in defending your home from thugs prior to the arrival of the police. But I digress.

We each took a turn trying to lift the Barrett, each letting out a little grunt. I felt the early onset of a hernia when I gave it a lift. Mark's eyes lit up like my wife's when she sees a new preview for the next installment of the
Twilight
movie series. In both cases, I have to say, I just don't get it.

We perused the booths for another couple of hours before it was time to go. I took a few photos of manufacturers and hunting guides' signs offering discounts “For NRA members and Tea Party Supporters.” You know, just for keepsakes. We walked outside and Dad and Mark looked visibly disturbed by the notion that they might have to walk a dozen blocks to their car carrying their heavily larded brochure bags. I spotted an opportunity to assume the role of teacher, putting my city-slicker upbringing to good use by hailing a pedicab. They were very pleased indeed. Before I could trudge the 1,913 steps to my own car, my phone rang. It was Dad, promising me the coldest gin and tonic of all time the next time I visited. “That pedicab was awesome,” he said. “You're a lifesaver.”

“Sure,” I said. “No problem.”

“Did you have fun?” Mark asked. They were on the speaker phone in Dad's car.

“Yeah, it was great,” I told them. “I never knew there were so many kinds of guns.”

“There's a whole lot more than that,” Mark said. “Listen, it was just awesome that you were able to come out for this. I really appreciate you driving over.”

“No problem,” I said. “I was thinking about coming out this fall to hunt some pheasant. Would you mind going with me?”

“Absolutely,” Mark said. “I thought you'd never ask.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I thought you'd never want to go hunting with me.”

Was he serious? Had he actually considered it?

“I guess I'm just curious,” I said. “I think I'd like to give it a try.”

“You bet,” he said. “You name the time and the place. I'll be there.”

“What about you, Dad? Would you want to go?”

“Uh, sure. If I can make it work with my schedule.” I was a little deflated at this. Here the three of us had spent the day bonding, and I was, although thoroughly tired and overwhelmed, on an odd high. I was picturing all kinds of hunting trips with Dad and Mark—elk out west, moose in Canada, maybe even a bear. But it's not like my dad to be romantic or swept away. Mark and I may have been momentary bosom buddies, but my ever-practical dad needed to check his calendar first.

The drive home was another morass of traffic. Though my GPS app claimed four hours, it took me more than six and I finally arrived home, dead tired and gun worn, well after midnight. Twenty hours, six hundred odd miles, more than twelve hours in the car and eight spent on a convention floor. I had learned a lot about guns, handled perhaps a hundred of them, and heard, for the first time ever, my dad refer to me as a “lifesaver” and himself as “a dirty old man.”

It was never about the guns, though I could still feel the oiled steel on my hands. I didn't go because I was looking for something. I went for Dad. I went for Uncle Mark. I went because if I am to understand these men and others in my family, I need to understand their interests, their passions. And while there were certainly frustrations, I felt—as I dragged myself to bed—like the whole day had been worth it . . .

Even if it was spent in Pittsburgh.

8

Consider the McRib

T
here's a story my mom likes to tell when she wants to embarrass me. Mostly around my sisters, my wife, the kind of people who know me and accept my foibles out of love or those who are involuntarily related to me and can, thus, go nowhere—theoretically anyway. It involves an incident from when I was around thirteen years old.

I was at that age, and I suspect many readers will know it well, when I tried desperately to spend as little time among the members of my family as possible. For some, this means spending time with friends, out among the throng. For these people, this is the age when juvenile delinquency kicks in. But, being relatively awkward among my peers and classmates, I spent a majority of this time by myself, watching television or doing other unproductive things in my parents' finished basement. There was a couch. A television. A pool table and enough aloneness to be quite appealing to my adolescent desire for time by myself.

It should be pointed out that I have always been, well, a bit fluffy. From my earliest memories, I was always among the tallest in my class. But, unlike other tall kids, I was never of the beanpole thinness—hollow of chest, slight of shoulder—that is often the case. I was more proportionate. Broad shouldered, thick legged, a slight paunch hanging above the Velcro closure of my Bugle Boy trousers. I wasn't fat, but it was evident to anyone that I had seldom missed a meal and, those I did have the misfortune of being tardy or absent for, I made up for with vigorous snacking.

I was an awkward tween with a snacking habit and penchant for solitude. The story that gives my mom so much delight stems from a day when she decided to clean the basement. I was off at school or spending the night at a friend's house or wandering aimlessly through the woods near our house or otherwise engaged in something benign and not noteworthy. The basement was usually my domain. It was rarely cleaned thoroughly, just regularly dusted and vacuumed, but one day Mom evidently decided, in addition to her usual cleaning tasks, a rearrangement of the furniture was in order. She had moved the chair, the small coffee table that acted as a TV stand, and a few lamps, but she was having a hard time making the room work without moving the couch. Mom is not a large woman. In fact she's quite petite, so I still have a hard time imagining her moving a full-size sleeper sofa on her own. But apparently she did just that. And when she did, she found something that would tickle her funny bone even twenty years later.

“I went to go vacuum behind the couch,” Mom usually says, “and I found two-dozen wrappers from Swiss Cake Rolls.”

How did they get there? Well, I put them there, of course. I adored Swiss Cake Rolls. Snappy chocolate covering on top of chocolate cake with spirals of fluffy yet tasteless white cream. They were heaven. But what I loved most about them was my ability to cram entire rolls in my mouth, chew a couple of times, and swallow the things in one mushy clump. I didn't eat Swiss Cake Rolls—or any snack food—for the pleasure of taste. I ate them for mass and to prove that I could get away with it. It was not at all uncommon for me to eat an entire box in one sitting. According to the Little Debbie website, each package of two Swiss Cake Rolls contains 270 calories (110 from fat) as well as 9 percent of daily fat; 5 percent of daily cholesterol; 6 percent of sodium; 13 percent of carbohydrates; and 4 percent of protein. That's for one package. I ate entire boxes. At a dozen packages per box, that's a whopping 3,240 calories—more than 150 percent of the 2,000 calories used as the basis for those daily percentages. It might be one thing if that was all I ate. But it certainly never was. Those boxes of Swiss Cake Rolls were pilfered, late at night, after eating three square meals and, more than likely, a couple of snacks.

It's pretty safe to say that I have had—for a considerable portion of my life—a complicated and destructive relationship with food. I didn't eat out of necessity or, even, a real interest in taste, texture, complexity, or preparation. I didn't eat because I had any good reason to eat. I ate out of boredom. I ate out of spite. I ate because I was uncomfortable with myself. Worry, anxiety, self-doubt, a need for comfort or to punish myself—these were and, to an extent, are my aperitifs. At the risk of sounding like an after-school special or a Lifetime original movie, food was a sort of drug to me; eating, an odd sort of coping mechanism, something I depended on.

I ate rather continuously through high school—offset by a couple hours of tennis six days a week—but in college, on my own for the first time with an abundance of food (pizza, the dining hall buffet, Chinese food for hangovers and lots and lots of beer), my eating began catching up with me. I came home for my first Christmas break and Mom saw me take my shirt off. My midsection was covered in red lines, like worms. She was horrified, which had me worried. Mom has spent most of my life working in doctors' offices, so when she gets concerned, it's enough to strike worry in the lightest of hearts. We went to the doctor expecting to hear about a strange skin disease, perhaps some sort of infestation. After a thorough examination, blood tests, and, I believe, a stool sample, the doctor returned with the results—stretch marks. She asked me if I had gained a significant amount of weight recently and I said no. After all, I was wearing the same pants I had been when I left for college, albeit increasingly lower on my hips, and I couldn't for the life of me imagine what would contribute to such a prodigious and rapid ballooning.

Then it hit me—chicken nuggets.

I ate chicken nuggets perhaps nine times a week. They were my favorite item at the dining hall. I ate them for lunch, for dinner, for appetizers and as side dishes, blissfully unaware of caloric content or fat grams.

And, if I was getting larger, I wasn't alone.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, obesity hit its stride in the years I was scarfing Little Debbies and pounding chicken nuggets. A regional overview of obesity statistics—in which obesity is defined as being thirty pounds overweight with a body mass index of 30 or greater—shows America was significantly fitter twenty years ago than it is today. In 1991, the percentage of obese American adults ranged from 9.6 percent in the Mountain Region (made up of Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming) to 14.1 percent in the East North Central Region (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio—where I grew up—and Wisconsin—where I was born). Seven years later, in 1998 (my third year in college), that range moved from 11.4 percent in New England to 20 percent in the South and West South Central (Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas). Three years beyond that, there was not a single region of the United States with a percentage of obese people lower than the 1991 high. And, now in the second decade of the millennium, the CDC estimates that 32.2 percent of American adults can be classified as obese.

The United States is a growing nation. It is unfortunate, however, that it is our collective midsection that is growing the fastest.

So I wasn't alone in my growth, and we only had ourselves to blame. We ate more processed food, more fast food, and less and less healthy protein and vegetables—unless you count the lettuce on our Triple Bacon Deluxes from Wendy's. Food became more fake, fatness more inevitable. I know I speak for myself when I say that I was—and in some small way am still—more likely to put fake food into my mouth than real. Indeed, the very definition of food changed dramatically in a generation. My dad grew up on or around farms and farming. He slaughtered pet cows and processed them into ground chuck, steaks, and all manner of tasty, meaty treats. He hunted for game and grew vegetables. In his lifetime, McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, and every other fast-food chain on the planet were invented and became billion-dollar companies.

But this is not about fast food, and I am not a crusading food writer. Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, I am not. Food has become so effortlessly available to Americans that it's no wonder we are expanding at such an alarming rate. We take for granted how easy it is to get nearly anything we want at nearly any time of day. It's become so easy that we are inventing ways of making food scarcity once again novel. There are many ways to illustrate this, but for the purposes of this chapter, let's look at one example in particular: The McRib sandwich from McDonald's.

Unlike other items on the fast-food giant's menu—the cheeseburger, the McChicken, et al.—the McRib is not a regular offering. Instead, it makes an occasional appearance and, in so doing, whips up what amounts to a national frenzy. Media outlets have reported customers crossing state lines just to get at the sandwich, which, in its construction, is shockingly simple. A pork patty on a bun with onions and pickles. So why do people go crazy for this foodstuff? Novelty, of course. It makes people feel like they are eating real food, slow-cooked pork ribs lovingly prepared, from the convenience of their cars. But the McRib frenzy would never have been possible were it not for the work of a midwestern academic.

In 1972, the exquisitely named University of Nebraska professor Roger Mandingo—I could say that name all day if given the opportunity, Mandingo, Man-ding-go—was awarded a grant from the National Pork Producers Council to work on a process to create something called “restructured meats.” The good Professor Mandingo worked what I imagine was tirelessly to find a means of binding pieces of meat together in different shapes using salt and mechanical action. He was successful, of course, and the resulting technology is what enabled such memorable meat products as chicken nuggets and the McRib, which is a pork patty shaped to give the rough look of rib meat on bone. Only there are no bones, just jutty bits of processed meat that are slathered in barbecue sauce.

One has to wonder why it is so important to form ground pork into pig-shaped patties in the first place? Authenticity, one has to imagine. Give eaters the opportunity to think they are eating a pig. In the October 2010 issue of
Esquire
magazine, Dan Coudreaut, the executive chef for McDonald's, tried to explain the sandwich's origin and its rampant popularity, even the need for shaped meat.
Esquire
writer Mark Mikin questioned Chef Dan about the design of the sandwich in the following exchange:

“It's a process called ‘chopped and formed,' ” he told the magazine. “So they take these big cuts of meat, they chop them up into smaller pieces, and then they press it together and put it into a mold that looks like that rib shape. It's frozen very quickly, then when it goes to the restaurant, it's put into our clamshell grills and cooked, and then helped with the sauce in the restaurant, and then voila.”

When—pardon the pun here—pressed about the presence of faux-rib-shaped ridges in the meat when they are not, in fact, real, Chef Dan said, “They are. They are real in our hearts. I hope I have a legacy like that someday.”

At the risk of coming across as hypocritically snobbish, I have to say—what the fuck? I have a dysfunctional relationship with food, but the McRib inspires examination. Let me get this straight. We kill a pig and strip the meat from its body. Once that meat is stripped, we chop and mash it until it bears positively no resemblance to a pig, only to then stuff it into forms in order to give it the appearance as once having been a part of a pig? I see.

Add to this the realization that I eat unhealthy food in quantities large enough to lead to obesity despite burning nearly 50 percent more calories than the government recommends and I come to the conclusion that it's high time I reconcile my relationship to food, eating, and the whole business of putting things in my mouth for the express purpose of mastication and ingestion.

Me, fat boy, need go on diet.

It was something Steven Rinella had said about the relationship between hunting and food that had gotten me thinking. It was in an episode of his show
The Wild Within
when he was hunting wild hogs with dogs among native Hawaiian people. The dogs had a hog cornered in a stream and the animal began attacking the dogs, making a lunge at Rinella. A second of hesitation passed before Steven killed the hog with a knife. In the moments following the kill, he looked at the camera and ad-libbed this line: “Everyone likes bacon; it's just that no one wants to kill the pig.”

That line stuck with me for some reason, and I began to see a secondary purpose to my hunting project: to change my relationship to food. Everywhere I turned that summer, food seemed to be the topic of conversation. There was an undercurrent of postmodern foodieism at the NRA show as salesmen hocked meat curing and flavoring products from their booths and implored sportsmen to feed their families right. Michael Pollan, the author and food guru, was on television news programs and Dr. Oz's show. A friend gave me a copy of Eric Schlosser's
Fast Food Nation,
which was turned into a movie and was available on cable. The First Lady, Michelle Obama, was offering tours of her organic vegetable garden on the White House lawn. America's youngest billionaire, media darling, and freakishly genius founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, had made a public proclamation to eat only food that he himself hunted.

I read with a keen interest the first story about Zuckerberg's project in the
New York Times.
He had killed a chicken by snapping its neck and butchered it in his backyard. He made headlines again a couple of months later when he announced that he had killed a bison for the meat. I thought it was interesting that the story made no mention of hunting the bison, just killing it, which led me to believe that he had called up fellow media mogul Ted Turner and asked if he could come over to shoot one of his. Turner, in addition to being the sire of CNN, is one of America's largest private land owners and possesses one of the biggest private stocks of bison, which he uses to supply his restaurant chain, Ted's Montana Grill.

“Hello, Ted? Hi, it's Mark Zuckerberg.”