What is it about carny food that is just so damn delicious? You know, carnival food. Festival food. Street market food. The stuff you buy from vendors who often look questionable, in need of a shower and say things like, “I just can’t figger’ out what happened to the cat? Now you want sauce on this pulled pork sandwich?”
What makes it so additictive? So tantalizing? Is it the sight — or the smell! — that lures us in like a tractor beam? “Must eat carny food! Carny food is my friend!”
I just can’t resist it.
I got to thinking about this at the Riverside Arts Market in Jacksonville last weekend. There were vendor stalls for art, crafts, soap and all manner of things. I was there with the family and wandering about, taking in the knickknacks and assorted “stuff” I didn’t need when a whisper through the crowds called to me, “Brian, it’s your true love. Come to me … over here in the boiling fat.”
“Excuse me,” I said to my wife. “I just felt a disturbance in the force. There’s carny food nearby.”
And off I went. She understood. It’s one of those unwritten rules in every relationship: Don’t come between a man and his carny food.
So off I trudged to drool at the slow-cooked beef brisket sandwiches with the barbecue sauce dripping down like waterfalls. Or the loaded hot dogs. Or the funnel cakes, fat as watermelons. I whistled at them and tried bad pickup lines — “So, do you fry here often?”
After three trips around the booths, many calculations, and a released notch on my belt, I settled on some Creole gumbo with chicken, sausage and shrimp — three of the six major carny good groups. (The other three being lard, beef-like substances, and anything breaded and deep-fried.)
I just can’t help it. If there’s a corn dog in the vicinity, I’m doomed. If I see a gyro bulging with meat and drowning in tzatziki sauce, just call me in sick the next day. If there is pulled pork, chicken on a skewer or pretty much anything that has been sitting out so long that the health department would shoot it dead on the spot, I’ll take it.
In fact, you smother an old shoe in grilled peppers and onions then put it on a hoagie roll and I’ll try it. I’m not that picky.
Which is funny because normally I am a very discriminating, and even healthy, eater. But that all goes out the window at a good festival when I get a whiff of grease in the air or onions caramelizing on a grill.
The thing about carny food is you never listen to your brain. All logic and common sense goes out the window. Why else would you consume a meatball sub with raw onions and a fried Snickers bar on top?
No, you listen to your eyes (which melt with love) and your gut (which would green-light deep-fried roadkill wombat if push came to shove.)
Common sense does not apply, nor do reasons like potential salmonella poisoning, sudden involuntary spleen rupture, your pants ripping apart from the instantaneous transfer of fat to your waist, the inevitable heartburn, or the fact that your family won’t spend time with you for at least a week (and might even make you sleep in the shed.)
No, all you hear is the Barry White voice coming from your belly that is urging you to take that Italian sausage sub with onion rings in your arms and caress it gently.
Never mind you’ll be doubled over in pain in a couple hours as your arteries seize up and it feels like someone is blow-torching a hole in your stomach. It will all be forgotten the next time you see a vendor selling carny food.