Chiefs, Eagles, No Bears, Khmai

In about a week, specifically next Sunday, a very familiar but tragic scene will unfold.  

Friends, family, and sworn enemies will gather in front of very large and expensive flat screen televisions. They will be as joyful as if they were attending their own weddings. They are ostensibly there to celebrate the championship culmination of a sport they don’t regularly watch.  

In their glee, they will ignore that they are indulging a culture that continues to at least tacitly accept chronic brain trauma, sexual and domestic assault, violence of many flavors, steroid and heavy painkiller use, and chronic genital exposure. I know it sounds like I’m just describing a regular weekend in Brett Favre’s home, but I am actually speaking of the NFL Super Bowl.  

We know that most people are actually gathering for other reasons than watching the game: to gorge themselves on appetizers and to watch a historic assemblage of something called commercials that they spend the rest of the year avoiding like the triple threat of Covid-19/Giraffe Pox/unspecified Superfungus. 

I also know you think I’ve already discussed the tragic part, and absolutely, that football culture, aka the unapologetic unthinking machismo of Roger Goodell and Jerry Jones et al, refuses to take any accountability is devastating. But this is a food newsletter, and so the real tragedy is what will happen at almost every single Super Bowl party on the planet next weekend.