White Sox pursue new frontiers of culinary absurdity
/Between hot dogs, cotton candy and cracker jacks, baseball games have always been forums for dietary escapism. Fans are stuck in one place for nearly four hours and are financially obligated to convince themselves they're having fun win or lose, so all the more reason to descend into a gluttonous fury. Your team got waxed but you ate two plates of funnel cake. What matters more?
DAN JOHNSON. // Credit: Ami Prindiville
With this in mind, the recent rather monied trend of bacon fetishization and development of gourmet junk food fits in naturally with the modern baseball experience. Playing along, The White Sox announced they will be adding bacon on a stick and a hamburger with macaroni and cheese on top of it (and bacon) on top of it to their food service, and it barely registers on a national scale because the Rangers did this on Wednesday
The White Sox actually already had a version of this in 2012, it just wasn't foreign-player themed.
Alongside the more blatant 'Rome before the fall' alterations to the food selection are more standard moves like pork chop and onion sandwiches, and switching their pizza provider from a company that actually specializes in reheated pizza (too appropriate for the ballpark) for the south side-centric Beggar's Pizza (right level of appropriate). The beer selection is expanding largely in the form of IPA's, with Lagunitas and Revolution Brewery's Anti-Hero, which is appropriate given how much of these additions seem like the high concept, high-fructose corn syrup concoctions the Logan Square spot would try.
The adobe mango chicken sausage and the expanded carving station sandwiches offer good alternatives to the standard burger and hotdog fare, but the chicken and waffle sandwich sounds more like a chicken patty shoved in between some Eggos. And then there's a three-pound banana split sundae, which is a three-pound banana split sundae. At least there are bananas. Which are fruit. Which are basically vegetables. This is eating vegetables.
Sometimes, when I want to cheer myself up about eating poorly, I try to imagine that even if what I ate went completely unprocessed by my body, and was just added on as pure extra mass, it wouldn't add that much in one blow. How does one do that with a three-pound sundae?
This all seems a year too late. Last season was the year fans deserved a pile of ice cream in exchange for their tolerance, or to literally drown their complaints in pig grease. This seems like a season where they can actually be lured with the promise of names of players on the team. That or Bell's Two Hearted Ale.
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