NEW YORK — By all accounts, Regis Philbin is a good guy. So I can’t understand why he and co-host Kelly Ripa staged a 270-person pie fight during “Live’s Guinness World Record Breaker Week.” Volunteers covered West 67th Street — and each other — with mounds of coconut custard.
They handily overturned the previous record of 253 people in Colchester, England, who took only minutes to throw 648 pies. They bested the 120 folks Guinness counted at a Los Angeles pie fight. Guinness World Records measures and counts the pies and makes sure everyone throws at least twice.
And this is our idea of fun?
Have we lost our minds all together? There are more than 1 billion people on this planet suffering from dreadful hunger and facing starvation and death. A billion people who do not have enough to eat, or enough to sustain themselves to the next day. Yet we count as entertainment an apparent disrespect for food, and for the sensibilities of the hungry poor.
ABC, which broadcast the event, reportedly made a donation to City Meals in atonement for the food fracas. If, as reported, they used 1,500 pies — retailing for about $7.00 each — then atonement would reach the far side of $10,000. Is that enough? Is anything enough?
Other folks with a lot of time on their hands call up Guinness and let them know they’re staging the world’s largest tea party or motorcycle pyramid. (In case you were wondering, the world record for the fastest time to peel and eat a lemon is 19.97 seconds set by Ashrita Furman at Guru Health Foods in Queens. Then there’s the fastest 100-meter barefoot run on ice, the fastest time to cook a turkey, and the most books typed backwards…)
But throwing food around — actually destroying it — is patently disgusting. Compare the Guinness record numbers with those in other venues. For example, the British medical journal The Lancet reported in 2003 that nearly 16,000 children die daily from hunger-related causes — that’s one child every five seconds. How many children died while Philbin presided over the waste of pounds of butter, sugar, eggs, coconut, milk, vanilla, flour and salt?
A billion or more people in developing countries are chronically undernourished; they simply do not have enough calories, vitamins and minerals to sustain growth, or even life. They do not have the soup kitchens, food stamps, and job training programs that the developed world employs to eradicate the roots of poverty and disease. They live from the land or depend on sporadic government handouts. They migrate from refugee center to refugee center, losing national identity and self-respect along the way. They are often treated with less care than animals.
They’ve probably never heard of ABC or Regis Philbin, who has been a charming and ubiquitous media presence for nearly 50 years. He holds the Guinness World Record for Most Hours on Camera — 16,343 hours at last count. He also does many things for charity, often for his alma mater, Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx. In recent years he’s competed on game shows for Hayes’ benefit, winning $50,000 on “Jeopardy”, $175,000 on “Are Your Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” and $50,000 on a special edition of “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?”
So the sight of an obviously generous man throwing food away is even more incongruous. And we, all of us who call food fights “entertainment,” are complicit, because we drive the audience numbers and advertising revenues that support this sort of nonsense.
(Phyllis Zagano is senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University and author of several books in Catholic Studies.)
