Are you hungry, peckish, esurient? Join me at Josie’s diner in Lexington, Kentucky, in the heart of Bluegrass country, where the horses are lean and very many people are, let me be frank, not. Josie’s is heaving at 8 a.m. as the well-upholstered clientele arrive for the morning feed. A mercifully slim student at the University of Kentucky is my waitress.
‘Hi, y’all! I’m Madeline Rose and I’ll be your server today,’ she announces, in the earnest tone of wait staff in a country where the credit card terminal offers the option of a 25 per cent tip. The menu she hands me is already expansive, but there’s more. She enumerates the day’s off-menu breakfast specials, available should anyone be unsatisfied by Josie’s signature Santa Cruz Burrito, featuring fresh scrambled eggs, chorizo sausage, grilled chicken, avocado with cheddar-jack cheese and ‘our tasty Santa Cruz sauce drizzle’ ($18.50).
‘So today our quiche is going to have ham, tomato and mozzarella,’ she announces, ending sentences on the upbeat that is the vernacular of young American blondes. ‘Our pancake special is our Oreo panwhich [a pancake sandwich, apparently], so it’s got two Oreo cookie pancakes and in the middle it’s got sweet cream and of course it’s got whipped cream and powdered sugar on top as well.’ A man bolder than me would have stopped her right there. Bring forth the Oreo panwhich! But Mrs Miller was wearing a disapproving look. The exegesis of Madeline Rose continues:
Our smoothie today is a cherry lemonade. The quesadilla is a pork carnitas – it’s got bell peppers and avocado ranch dressing in it. Our soup [for who would eschew soup for breakfast?] is a buffalo chicken [not a hybrid between a buffalo and a chicken, but spicy chicken], and our main breakfast special is a croissant with ham, cheddar and mozzarella. It’s a croissantlette [sic] – that’s an open-faced omelette with a croissant in the middle, and you get another croissant alongside as well.
An explanation for American corpulence is emerging, but wait – there’s more. ‘And for dessert we do have a bread pudding; it’s white chocolate pecan.’
Me, interrupting: ‘You can have dessert at breakfast?’
Madeline: ‘Of course you can!’
Mrs Miller permits me an egg, and a sausage. This is the Bible Belt. ‘Don’t stop praying,’ says a sign on Josie’s wall. Sound advice given the cardiovascular hazards on offer at this establishment, where a full English breakfast would be considered a mere amuse bouche.
Dessert for breakfast! A story that I plan to, er, dine out on for years. I get my first chance at the Kentucky Horse Park that afternoon, where I am loyally supporting Mrs Miller’s eventing horse, Happy Boy, that she has flown in from England for the occasion. (Since you ask – by FedEx, in an air stable, at a cost it is embarrassing to admit.)
In the VIP chalet into which I have insinuated myself, a copious luncheon is being served. Senior management being distracted elsewhere, I tuck in and recount my discovery of the breakfast dessert to a European acquaintance, who immediately trumps me.
I got chatting to a couple of Kentucky State Troopers, not themselves obese, and asked why there are so many XXL people in America. ‘Because the food is good,’ one replied
He tells me of a scene at a Dairy Queen (an iconic American ice-cream chain) where a woman of formidable dimensions became entrapped in her chair, after consuming a fantastic concoction that had caused her to be unable to rise. It had taken four strong men to free her, accompanied by pitiful wailing. ‘I remain traumatised by the sight,’ said my friend.
Wandering over to the Mars trade stand, where they plied me with free M&M’s, I got chatting to a couple of Kentucky State Troopers, not themselves obese, and asked why there are so many XXL people in America. ‘Because the food is good,’ one replied. And it’s true. Josie’s was excellent. I had sensational Mexican food in Midway, Kentucky – a town smaller than my village in France – the equal of anything I’ve eaten in Mexico. At home in France, you’re lucky to get much more than a stale croissant at the average village café.
Mrs Miller’s horse having distinguished himself show jumping at the Horse Park, my gustatory elegy moves to Cincinnati Northern Kentucky Airport, where the speciality is five-way chili – a bed of spaghetti topped with chili, layered with shredded cheese, diced onions and kidney beans. I left Mrs M in the Delta lounge and dug in, a final fling before my flight to Paris.
I read that a new generation of drugs may finally solve the obesity crisis. I’m doubtful. Many Americans appear to be enjoying eating themselves to death – although not all, happily. The attendant on the flight home, Channelle, was (I am hoping Mrs M doesn’t read this) an astonishingly good-looking, charming and slim African American. I congratulated her on her outstanding figure and shared my discovery of the breakfast dessert.
She pulled out her phone and showed me a photograph of an archetypal fatty: rolls of flab, jowls of lard. ‘Who’s that?’ I demanded. ‘That’s me, a year ago,’ she replied. These surely are days of miracles and wonders. Her saviour, she said, was the Keto Diet, which induces ketosis (a thing, apparently) in which the body burns fat for energy instead of carbohydrates, resulting in dramatic weight loss – in her case from 117 to 53 kg. Goodbye Oreo pancakes, hello lean meat and fish.
Her obesity had nearly killed her, she told me. After losing weight, she had to have a triple heart bypass to repair the damage. Channelle, at least, has discovered the cure to obesity: willpower. Since this is a quality I lack, it is as well I am leaving behind me the breakfast pudding and returning to the relative austerity of the tables of France.
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