LA: The Capital of Excess

When I step off the plane in Los Angeles on a sunny day, my first inkling comes from the gut: I need fast food and I need it now.

For all the dietary babble, the streets of LA boast a fatty trim of fast food joints all promising the same supersized thing: cheap tasty junk. Much of it is fried and polysaturated. For someone who hardly ever eats junk food, it’s all rather hard to resist.

Los Angeles is renowned for doing everything bigger and better, and when it comes to food, it’s true. A single day of eating in LA can square a year of binging anywhere else. Before midday, I have already downed a burger at In-N-Out on Sunset Boulevard, famous for its ‘secret menu’. Curly fries entangle in my belly as I head down to Manhattan Beach for corn chips and college football, aka ‘Lunch’.

Come afternoon tea, after a one-track degustation of carbs, my mind is full of fuzzy images: buskers on median strips; tacky souvenir shops; never-ending highways with saintly nomenclature stretching away to some salvation. Everything in between is just billboards and burger joints.

It’s at a cookie Valhalla in Westwood Village that my fast food indulgence culminates. Joining the back of a twenty-metre line, I’m on the cusp of a transcendental junk food experience, LA-style. The people ahead of me seem like normal city folk. But when I get closer, they all have a hysterical look about them – that of children on family road trips before they enter small-town lolly shops. I have arrived at Diddy Riese Cookies: home to the ice cream sandwich, zenith of sweet pan-American dietary zip.

When I make it inside, I’m confronted by twelve flavours of ice cream and what looks like hundreds of cookies. The business of choice is completely DIY and seemingly limitless, just like LA.

Dark-haired boys speak tersely from behind the counter: “Yah,” they ask, which translates roughly as ‘What would you like, Sir?’ I’m not really ready, so I blurt something out. “Oatmeal raisin…with rocky road, please.” In the capital of excess, no combination of cookie and cream is too outlandish. Within seconds my choice materialises and I’m outside having a 250gram sugar coma.

The whole experience is empowering. Life, Liberty, and other Amendments are enshrined in the sweet act of calorie consumption. It’s the small things that make a democracy – not voting rights, but the right to get in one’s car and drive 15 miles on heavily clogged arterials, radio blaring, to line up for 20 minutes just to choose two types of cookie and one type of mind-blowing ice cream, whack them in a cup, with or without a spoon – you decide, all for a $1.50. It’s sticky elbows and spiking insulin levels as you return to the Valley in your rented SUV, but 10 minutes later, sated by 500 calories of pig fats, corn syrup, fructose, colouring and cookie dough.

All hail the five American food groups.