Seven-11 Corn Dog

A pattern is developing in America, and were it not for the fact that it has adversely affected the personal enjoyment of my avocation, I wouldn’t give a dormouse’s perineum. But since it has and continues to, I decry it here. It can be graphed and pie-charted in terms of America’s widening chasm between the haves and the have nots, or as I prefer to delineate them, the haves and the haven’ts.

While the former is easily lambasted by haute cuisine punditry in matters of attempted high art in cooking, it is not for the squeamish gourmet commentator to suggest the very real truth that the latter’s component of the grid is likewise guilty of poor discernment. Indeed, when one disdains the masses in print, a torrent of objection, derision and even threatened violence ensues. That said, I fear not the rabble, as the security apparatus at my Beverly Hills apartment building is impervious, and my leased Mercedes has a stunning acceleration ratio.

To my dismay, the American lower middle class continues to infuse food culture with its tremendous collective market share, which alongside its low-bar definition of food itself, has devastated the quality of my writing assignments. That’s the problem with the impecunious. There are so many of them.

There has in the past many years been a diminishment in minimally acceptable standards in aliments and beverages, not to mention a dumbing down of excellence in much of so-called fine dining. Again, if America’s great unwashed somnambulating into a blissful acceptance of bad food and bad drink had no impact upon my day to day, I would derive some modicum of amusement from it. But such is not the case.

I am The Dismayed Gourmet. I have supped at the finest tables in Paris and New York. I have sampled sashimi grade tuna on the docks of Yaezu in Shizuoka Prefecture. I have drunk tupelo honey from the cask. I have been an elite gourmet critic since my early twenties and now, because of a flagging economy, I find myself as a doddering old man put out to pasture reviewing food my bowels should hardly be expected to manage.

I know food. I know wine. I know good and I know bad, and contrary to common opinion in London food circles, I am not a cynic. It is apparent to me though that the times they are a-changing, and that I will heretofore no longer be included among the newest preferred aggregation of market-relevant voices in state-of-the art gourmet op-ed.

However the winds of popular foodie sycophantry blow, I will not condone anything I don’t adore, just as I won’t savage anything I do adore. I have established, maintained, and now lost track of my distinguished career on this guiding principle. In my forced reinvention for trash-talk America, I have been cast as the villain of every piece I write, because I now write about truly bad food. What I write about now is a different side of the spectrum from that to which I have for decades been accustomed. I parse not the infinite subtleties between good and great, but rather the likewise endless gradations between poor and wretched.

I used to be able to walk a tightrope, either side of the suspended cable held taught by uncompromising standards as pertains to the world’s best food. But now, a downward palatal attenuation among America’s hoi polloi along with a crash in formerly high-yield securities has created a market for food reviews of indigestible comestibles, and I, gentle reader, suffer under this yoke as I never have in my thirty years of seeking out the minutest flaw in the tartar, the soupcon of a chef’s indecisiveness in the vichyssoise, or an oyster three degrees too warm.

While antithetical to my upper echelon epicurean orientation, this week’s assignment is the Seven-11 corn dog. Know that I will not compromise my standards here or anywhere else, so however degrading the assignment, I will be frank. For those taking notes, that’s a corn dog joke.

To continue, Seven-11 is a morally bankrupt corporate entity that hires the honest and desperate, and pays them next to nothing to perform the Herculean task of working long and doleful hours cleaning, stocking, and selling, all the while risking armed incursions from local criminals. In the scathing indictment of the Seven-11 corn dog that is to follow, let it in no way reflect on the personnel at the Seven-11 in Woodland Hills, California at which I acquired Coney Island's bad idea whose time should never have come, the corn dog. For those who, now unlike me, have never had a Seven-11 corn dog and unlike myself at the moment have a functioning colon, please resist any temptation to break that pattern of abstention.

If you ingest these stomach bombs with any regularity, there must be a twelve-step program of some sort available to you along with some elective surgery that might correct whatever damage you may have done. Given the scope of this corporation’s market penetration and the fact that the corn dog remains among the various possible deleterious purchasing decisions in a place where each one is calculated to be a mistake, i.e. lottery tickets, beer, cigarettes and pornography, the corn dog is perhaps the apex of this ruse, this jape, this abject snookering of persons who simply don’t know better.

The Seven-11 corn dog is proof that if one believes in predestination, a cruel and merciless God exists, one in whose many mansions none of the flies have wings. If the corn dog was an inevitability, that is a thing that confirms atheism, or at the least that the animosity of God toward man suggested by Jonathan Edwards was spot on.

The foundation of this twisted design is the hot dog, essentially ground pig or beef gristle mixed with facial meat, organ trimmings and levels of bovine and porcine fecal matter deemed acceptable to the FDA. This repository of rejected animal flesh is then rolled in corn flour, fried in hot oil and mounted on a stick. Seven-11 corn dogs bear the additional disadvantage of having lain congealing under heat lamps for unknown periods of time.

As I lifted the abomination to my lips, I trembled in anticipation of the punishment I was about to receive like a beaten dog about to feel his cruel master’s foot. The pungency collected in my nostrils and charged through my sinuses like a wild boar in pursuit of an injured deer. It was a harbinger of the terror about to come but I knew that if I did not suffer through at least a single bite, I would lose all credibility with my readership, and that is one thing that I will never allow.

In my gaping maw it went and as front teeth top and bottom sliced through the flaky cornmeal crust, I had a fleeting notion that this might not be the gastronomical iron maiden I had anticipated. The one that I selected from the hopper in which they were held may have been a recent addition, sparing me of the experience of the trifecta of unhealthy, flavorless and stale, but once my mandible crushed down upon the wiener within, that fantasy dissipated like a single ice cube in a glass of warm vodka.

My tear ducts emptied themselves of their stinging brine, my glottis collapsed and my stomach orchestrated a replication of Mary Lou Retton’s tumbling routine in her performance at the 1984 summer Olympiad. When I write, I feel as though I am giving a deposition in a court of law in that I feel I must tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so here are the unpleasant details.

I vomited. I chewed and swallowed and attempted to keep this bite of corn dog down but I could not. I regurgitated. Through my nose I regurgitated. I felt like a Play-Doh accessory, processing a malleable amorphous substance through a double-barreled aperture, a kind of two-stranded spaghetti maker producing a yellow and pink child’s delight onto my shirt, jacket and ascot.

To borrow a phrase from the iconic team of Siskel and Ebert, two decent men of admirable taste now gone from this Earth, two thumbs down on the Seven-11 corn dog. I am, though still recovering, truly yours, The Dismayed Gourmet.