The human feed bag experiment

can a person eat out of a bag that's strapped to their face?

Hello, clowns!

It’s nice to be back home.

I was only in Louisville for a few days (I was visiting KFC’s headquarters, of all places) but I felt like I was gone forever. During that time, I was able to try a real Hot Brown, which was weirdly disappointing compared to Davida’s superior guessed version. The original was a little too mealy and heavy for me, but at least I can say I’ve had one now.

The return flight from Louisville to Chicago was quite short, so I spent most of it relaxing (just kidding, it was turbulent as shit) and listening to some tunes. When I got restless, I started poking around in the pouch in the seat in front of me.

I flipped through the in-flight magazine, then pulled out an item that I haven’t seen in years. It was a barf bag.

I was subtle about looking at it; I didn’t want my neighbor to think I was about to lose my Hot Brown right next to him. But when he wasn’t paying attention, I slipped the bag in between the pages of the book I’d brought on the airplane with me, and brought it home. I knew there was something I could do with it, but what?

Then I remembered an old Onion headline that I’ve always loved. (The accompanying video is amazing, by the way.)

The Onion @TheOnion

In Focus: New Wearable Feedbags Let Americans Eat More, Move Less onion.com/1u2fBxN

It reads, “New Wearable Feedbags Let Americans Eat More, Move Less.”

The image shows a man wearing a Taco Bell-branded feed bag over his face and I knew what I had to do. I could use the barf bag for the exact opposite of its purpose by using it to put food inside me instead of containing food I ejected outside of me.

It seemed pretty straightforward, all I had to do was dump some food into it, strap the thing onto my head, and just go to town on lunch.

Or so I thought.

Before I started, one thing did occur to me.

There was no telling exactly how long this barf bag was on the airplane. My guess is that it had lived in that seat pocket for years, because I don’t think people get sick on airplanes terribly often.

That being said, who knew what types of pathogens had lived in it thus far? Planes see hundreds of thousands of people traveling within them during their many years of service. Everyone is constantly leaking germs and viruses (case in point, the last three years), which means this barf bag has been in proximity of at least a few major bugs.

So just to make myself feel a little safer, I lined the inside with a Ziploc freezer bag.

Adding a food storage diaphragm would obviously keep me safe from every single potential bug in this thing. Never mind the fact that I was about to strap this fucking receptacle to my face and breathe in and out of it for an extended period of time. As we all know, it’s not like you can just breathe a virus in and get sick, right?

Why’s everyone so quiet all of a sudden?

I tested the fit of the bag by itself by putting it up to my face while pretending to chew.

I could see myself eating a meal out of this thing, no problem. I mean, horses eat out of feed bags just fine, obviously an advanced primate such as myself could handle such a challenge.

Next, I had to find a way to fasten it to my face.

I grabbed some kitchen twine and roughly measured a length of it that would wrap around my ears comfortably, yet fasten to the barf bag. Feed bag. I mean feed bag.

“What should I eat out of this thing?” I asked Davida. “I kinda want a chicken salad sandwich. Should I just put a whole sandwich in here?”

Let it be known that Davida hated this entire feed bag idea to begin with. She thought it was stupid and was very vocal about it. That’s okay. My genius often suffers in silence. It’s hard being a revolutionary food writer who wants to eat like a horse, you know?

After a long pause, she suggested a can of Chef Boyardee.

“I feel like it has to be small pieces of something, but not small enough to be a choking hazard,” she said. “Plus, this whole thing is all about convenience, right? What’s more convenient than Chef Boyardee?”

I mean, she’s not wrong. Anything from Chef Boyardee is convenience in a can, plus canned pasta is nothing short of three Michelin stars in my book. Soon I’d be even eating it without using my hands.

We then went to the grocery store to grab the Chef Boyardee.

I stood in the aisle trying to figure out which variety would be best for the human feed bag. Spaghetti noodles seemed unwieldy, and I thought I would possibly choke on the the Overstuffed ravioli. Or did I want to switch to Spaghettios and slurp them up like a bottom feeder?

In the end, I picked the more middle-of-the-road variety, which was the plain old beef ravioli. Not too big, not too small, they’re truly the Goldilocks of canned pasta.

Shit got a little more real when I actually dumped the ravioli into the barf-turned-feed bag.

“What, you’re not even going to heat it up?” asked Davida.

You real ones know that the best way to eat Chef Boyardee is straight from the can while depressed, right? It really puts the rest of your life into perspective.

Davida helped me by taping the kitchen twine on the feed bag after I wrapped it around my head.

This happened after some bickering, however. It turns out that taping a piece of string to an airline barf bag while having it strapped around your melon is not very easy.

After it was fastened, however, I realized that I had made a few critical mistakes. One was that I did not anticipate what it would be like to huff Chef Boyardee, since I was literally wearing it on my face. I was straight up inhaling those watery tomato fumes and I could not escape them.

Second of all, it hadn’t quite occurred to me just how physically long a barf bag actually is. As you can see by the photo, my mouth was situated nowhere near the food. So all I was doing was replacing all my oxygen with Chef Boyardee air without getting a single bite of it. Plus the weight of the food itself made it so that there was no way for me to simply tilt my head back to eat it; the bag would dangle off the front of my face uselessly.

“You realize that horses have long faces, right?” asked Davida. “That’s how they can eat out of those bags.” Never in my entire lifetime was I more painfully aware of that fact.

Davida suggested I cut the bag to a much shorter length, then try again. Not a bad idea. But because I was afraid I’d fuck the whole experiment up if I cut the bag wrong, I decided simply to roll it up like a sleeve in order to make it shorter. Then couldn’t figure out how to attach the thing to my face.

Davida ran to the bathroom, grabbed a headband, and slipped it around my face and the bag.

(In retrospect, his photo looks somewhat terrifying. Or a little BDSM. And yes, I could use a trim. I am willing to admit all of this in the pursuit of award-losing food writing.)

She managed to cinch everything together and finally, my face made contact with the Chef Boyardee pasta sauce. I started slurping at it and Davida immediately busted out laughing.

“This is so gross,” she said, between giggles. I immediately had a difficult time remembering why we were even doing this in the first place.

“I know,” I said, my voice muffled through the ravioli and the barf bag.

But I was determined to make this happen. I could not for the life of me, however, manage to get a grip on one of the delectable Chef Boyardee ravioli, and I was starting to get pissed. I started wiggling my jaw around when I noticed something on the floor.

Sauce was starting to drip out from around my face, and my mortal enemy, Scorpion, had discovered this fact.

I nudged him away with my foot while shouting into the ravioli, and before I knew it, the human feed bag was upside down on the floor.

The floor was suddenly a Jackson Pollock painting of sweet canned pasta sauce. The splatter was all over my feet, on Davida’s legs, and later, I discovered, had made it all the way up to the ceiling. I stood there, empty-mouthed and dumbfounded. I hadn’t even gotten a chance to eat a single pasta dumpling.

Then I heard the sound of Davida giggling. It was quiet at first, but then she burst into a full on belly laugh.

“Okay,” she said. “I thought this was a stupid idea but I take it back now. It was all worth it.”

So to recap:

• I took a barf bag off a plane

• I lined it with a plastic bag

• I filled the bag with ravioli

• I had my fiancée attach the barf bag to my face

• I tried to eat the ravioli out of the barf bag

• The barf bag fell on the floor

• I should pick a new profession

I can now say with confidence that a human being cannot easily eat canned pasta out of a face-mounted feed bag. Plus, it’s a little weird having a second person keep said bag strung up to your head while you’re trying to eat room-temperature Chef Boyardee out of it.

So I guess we won’t actually be seeing any Yum! brand restaurant feed bags anytime soon. But if the delicious minds behind Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC can engineer something that works, I’ll be first in line to test it out. Just fill mine with Chef Boyardee beef ravioli, please.

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The longer I think about having tried to eat my lunch out of a barf bag, the more I question my own existence.

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