I was on Gourmet.com today, admiring it’s beautiful aesthetic. I love the color palate, the simplicity and the beautiful images that accompany the articles. As my eyes were scanning the homepage, I came across something familiar but yet somewhat out of place in its context. It was the Happy Meal pizza from uber-pop blog Thisiswhyyourefat.com, a site I am all too familiar with. For those living under the proverbial rock; or using a 14.4 modem to try and apply that same LP nostalgia to you PC; Thisiswhyyourefat.com is a website that hosts user submitted pictures of creations like: lardz (deepfried lardballs covered in sugar), the pizza cone (an ice cream cone shaped pizza), Double BBQ Stack Burger (pictured) & deep fried cheeseburger on a stick (deep fried cheeseburger on a sitck). A cornucopia of conflicting adjectives has been used to describe the site’s images. Adjectives like disturbing, genius, gross, gluttonous, amazing, etc.

Robert Ashley is the author of the aforementioned article on Gourmet.com called The Gross-Food Movement. It is a great piece abstracting and dissecting this burgeoning culinary sub-culture online. He is also responsible for the label “Gross-Food”.

I, sports fans, am no stranger to this sub-culture. I’m too picky an eater to be a foodie. My mother was unfortunately not the best cook while I was growing up, so I subsisted on the ever innovative menus of the many fast food establishments that freckle the beautiful, under appreciated borough of Staten Island. I also had an open kitchen after school, a freezer filled with frozen junk food, and lots of friends that “helped me get by”. We would mix together, deep fry anything we could possibly think of. Once the state put us behind the wheel, we were able to find those who had perfected out amateur experiments in cholesterol raising. Places like the Grease Trucks in New Jersey, Crif Dogs in New York City and Cherry Valley in Queens. Coinciding with our coming of age was this wonderful fad called the internet. Allowing people to share their similar experiments with the world (or at least those on the right side of the digital divide)

This article is a great overview of how these foods are represented and proliferating. He speaks to the contributors of this movement who take offense to the term “gross-food”. He mentions how this movement takes the general atmosphere of eating healthy, buying local, improving out diets and gives it the middle finger. This reminded me of a similar movement. Punk Rock.

There are many who see these abominations and gag. It is crass. It is offensive to the thoughtfully developed, subtle and tasteful creations by innovators who have worked their whole lives to perfect their craft. It is food for and by those who cannot cook well (though I am not saying that there are not those who contribute that do not have serious skill). It’s creating without the need for refined skill. It’s seeing three chords on the cover of a photocopied zine and starting a movement out of it.

It’s a movement that once given a name, people have an easy way to identify and then criticize. A name that while semantically derogatory at first, may indeed become a term representing relevance and importance. It’s food without the boundaries of convention that and kid can get up and do. Can up and create something awesome that their parents will look at and scoff. Say “That’s not food, that’s crap.”

While there may not be the obvious message at first glance that Punk Rock screeched into a microphone, it is indeed in response to a culture beginning to be taken over by the 11-minute guitar solos of gastronomy. It's going against the haute-dogs and glam-burgers. It's taking back peasant food. It's quick. It’s easy. And best of all anyone can do it. Even me.