Hot Super Bowl News

Many people suggest healthy, nutritious snacks for this Sunday. Balderdash.

Healthy snacks for Super Bowl Sunday, the collective national rite where real Americans drive drunk to gather on home couches and watch 300-pound men with enlarged hearts give each other concussions and torn ligaments live on digital television? Hardly. Save those healthy snacks for watching touch football or cricket.

Sunday’s menu is a single word: Pizza. 

At Super Bowl parties, friends and families gather before home video altars in a ritual so sacred that an hour becomes 215 minutes long. Congregants invoke the Deity’s name loudly, especially after penalties and missed field goals. Religious events require items of symbolic communion, and few foods are as communal as sliced pizza.

This Sunday Americans will consume 40.5 million pizzas, over 472 slices a second  (extrapolating from figures provided by the  National Association of Pizzeria Operators).  Midshipmen at the US Naval Academy have already ordered 3,000 pies for game time. Sunday is Christmas for pizza makers and pizza cheese makers, if not for insurers of pizza delivery drivers (the day’s biggest winners: Bookies).

Orthodox Super Bowl watchers hold a hot slice in one hand and a beer can in the other. Other holidays have three-day weekends or week-long runs, so beer consumption is greater. But 51 million cases of beer were bought this past week; all this brew will be downed in just  a few hours, during the pre-game shows and Super Bowl.

Will party-goers feel guilty about consuming massive amounts of calories, carbs and fat on Sunday? Certainly not. It’s a sacred American obligation, like gorging on Thanksgiving dinner.

And just how much food will the nation consume during the game, anyway? The figure “156 billion calories” is bounced around like a fumbled pigskin, but without source attribution. It’s like this number came from Outer Space.

 

The name “Super Bowl” and associated logo are owned by a near-monopoly called the NFL, and are used here under the parody clause of the Fair Use Doctrine.

Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not boring or obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.

Tags: food, football, NFL, pizza, sports, Super Bowl 44, Super Bowl XLIV, television