How dare YOU, sir!
Last month, some crack office reporting by Web editor/late-night television personality Alison Rosen shed some needed light on the healthier-than-thou TONY lunch collective. By way of associate features editor/what’s-her-angle-she-can’t-possibly-be-this-nice Kate Lowenstein, we found out… stuff. Naturally, the group’s aesthetically pleasing, low-cost and presumably tasty daily fare inspired some envious feelings around here (mostly among the cagey, vended-chips-and-space-ice-cream-for-every-meal set). Now, because many of us here are jerks (guilty), we naturally jumped when the "other" Web editor/king jerk Dustin Goot suggested that we disenfranchised eaters form a rival gang, as it were. They began as nobodies, and ended up heroes. This is their story.
Mat Brown and Goot the hirsute preparing the spread
Hello all,
Katharine and I feel that the hegemony of the Time Out Lunch Club has reigned long enough. We’re forming a splinter group (name TBD, though it will combine the word lunch with a word that is not club).
Our goal: a shared lunch involving zero home preparation and minimal nutritional benefits. The opening meeting will convene this Thursday with a KFC bucket. Suggested sides include Twinkies, Cheetos, Funyuns, anything from Little Debbie and Slim Jims.
Finally, we’re recruiting warriors. We fully anticipate a heated rivalry with the existing club. Lives may be lost, but it will all be for the greater good.
Yours,
D & K
P.S. Any information about this that is conveyed to actual members of lunch club will be considered a treasonous act and dealt with accordingly.
Thus read Dustin’s tongue-in-cheek call to arms. After some debate (see: no debate), the new team settled on associate features editor/ghost hunter Ashlea Halpern’s inspired suggestion, "The Fat Kids’ Table." We were united at last, and the collective feeling was best summed up by Eat Out writer Alex Van Buren when she wrote:
I am so darn honored to be on this list of rejects, I can hardly even talk
about it without bawling.
I’ll be there.
At last, the fated day arrived. Dustin brought his promised bucket of the Colonel’s finest, and the rest of us brought assorted junk food of all shapes and sizes—for my part that included six doughnuts from the gas station across the street. While I wasn’t too worried about the prospect of internecine bloodshed, I did have a real concern that office caretaker John Rose would go into diabetic shock if he came within five meters of our Twinkied mountain. Way overly impressed with ourselves, the newly christened Fat Kids’ Table smugly giggled and guffawed, waiting for the adjacent "healthists" to blanch at our sugary statement of revolution. As matters turned out, though, they handled themselves with class and dignity worthy of young professionals, as opposed to our needy, childish antics. Well met, worthy adversaries. Without anything else to prove, online developer Matt "No, that’s the other Matt" Fitzgerald and myself seized on his bold gambit to microwave marshmallows onto our extra-crispy chicken.
And I have to tell you, marshmallowed chicken is fantastic.
