All-you-care-to-eat

When I was last in America 2 years ago I was having my passport and visa checked by a surly immigration officer. He was looking at my nearly 10 year old passport picture (taken 10 years ago unsurprisingly) when I was 18 and comparing it with the photo on my U.S. work visa (taken a week or two prior to my trip) when I was 28. He flicked slowly between the 2 photos gradually building up to a rapid flick presenting him with a zoetropic flick-book animation of aging in the intervening decade. He stopped and, in what I am convinced was some kind of immigration test designed to get a reaction out of me, he said, “You’ve put on weight man!”

Although I may have over-stated my jovial hurt by inviting the man to think how he had changed over the last 10yrs, a part of me saw his unkind observation as an achievement – a badge of honour. Here was a man from the nation of obesity telling me I had achieved a small but noticeable change in weight worthy of mention. He had meant to sound unkind and provocative but curiously he had inadvertently welcomed me – embraced me – to his great nation. It was almost like he was saying, “Welcome home. You’re one of us now. Your visa is useless here, your paunch entry requirement ebough. Come on in. Make yourself at home. The all you can eat buffet is just the other side of the baggage reclaim and there is plenty of maple syrup to keep you going should you feel a bit faint before you get there. Next stop diabetes and the state funeral at Arlington Cemetery that such dietary achievements qualify you for.”

So imagine my disappointment when arriving on my most recent trip Stateside, now armed with new passport and visa (the old ones having expired), when the immigration officer made no mention of my body mass index. The photos in my new passport were taken within too close a time-period to contain the dramatic obesity time-lapse contained in the old one. I was rocked. I had to take action. If I wasn’t going to get the buzz of approval and welcome I had got from the last visit upon this entry I was sure as hell going to try and get it when I left. I wanted there to be enough of a change in my body fat in 10 days for the immigration officers to be sorry to see me leave. I wanted to hear an immigration officer say, “I wish he could stay. He’s big enough. We’ve let one slip through the net there. Britain is lucky to have him. Let’s have a whip round so we can buy him the extra airplane seat he now needs by way of compensating for our oversight.” That would teach ‘em.

If that were going to happen I would have to go some. Below is what I ate over a 10 day visit to Washington DC – the sum of my efforts to gain hero status with US immigration officials.

Please note:
Any salad on the list, although genuinely made up of healthy fruit and veg type things, was merely a vessel for delivering excessive quantities of fats and sugars in the guise of salad dressings into my diet.

Most things were washed down with beer. Beers are harder to count by the nature of their physiological affects and have therefore been excluded from the list until such a time as an accurate and verifiable beer-count can be obtained

Where multiple foodstuffs appear in the list it is important to note that duplicates were not necessarily consumed in the same meal or indeed even the same day. In some cases however it is true that repeat meals occurred in quick succession of each other – within hours if not minutes on occasion.

1 King Prawn spaghetti with an olive tapenade pesto
1 Thai green chicken curry
1 Chicken Parmigiano
5 Hamburgers (3 from the same place 1 with fries 1 with onion rings and 1 with tater tots)
4 Hotdogs
2 Salad buffet salads
1x3 breakfast pancakes with bacon and maple syrup
2x3 Slices French toast with bacon and maple syrup
(1 with 2 eggs sunny side up)
2 Chicken Caesar Salad wraps
(1 from a super market and 1 handmade from a deli)
8 donuts
1 Buffalo chicken sub
1 Greek Salad
2 chicken Quesadillas with rice
1 Slice of pizza
1 Chocolate milkshake
1 Chili con carne
1/2 Chicken and Beef chili nachos
1/2 Pulled pork sandwich with mop sauce and tater tots
1 truffle egg and 5 chickpea and cucumber canapés
(at the Ambassador’s reception)
5 or so handfuls of pretzels
(at the Halloween Frat party)
5 or so handfuls of kettle chips
(at the Kennedy Center private party at the Watergate)
1 famous Ben’s Chili Bowl chilidog
(as favoured by Bill Cosby and Barack Obama apparently)

It didn’t work. Yes, I put on a bit of weight – enough to have a slight negative affect on my self-esteem – but not enough to get a ticker-tape parade from the US immigration department. I consoled myself by eating the individual portion of butter that British Airways had provided as part of my in-flight meal. I ate it whole and then asked for more. I left the rest of the meal untouched. I just ate butter for the duration of my flight home. The only times I wasn’t eating butter was when my silent tears were dripping into my open passport, running off the laminated photo and blurring the ink on my emergency contacts page.

I am home now, and am putting myself on a crash-diet of vitamins. My recommended 5 portions of fruit and veg has been ramped up to 7-a day (and for now opal fruits don’t count) in an effort slim down in time for my next passport photos so I can start this sorry game of weight-gain top trumps all over again with a more dramatic before and after contrast. One day I’ll be a fat immigration hero – an all-American diabetic colossus – once more. That’s the American dream, and even Brits can dare to dream it. Stockpile the cheesy Wotsits – I’m coming America!