Super Bowl Sunday: Please pass the pizza, I mean, carrots.

Silence Dogood here. What day do Americans gobble down more food than any other? Thanksgiving Day, of course (gobble gobble). And what’s the second biggest day for pigging out? Christmas? Wrong. July Fourth? Nope. Turns out, according to an article in today’s Wall Street Journal, it’s Super Bowl Sunday. 

Super Bowl fans probably aren’t as surprised to read this as I was, but they’re bound to be surprised to learn that “The Super Bowl is the largest single event for carrots,” specifically baby carrots, or that 71.4 million pounds of avocados (that’s 143 million avocados, folks) will be eaten on that one day. The surprise factor is reduced a bit if, instead of envisioning 143 million people scooping out avocado flesh and spooning it up, as I did, you picture them dipping their chips into bowls of guacamole. But I still find it surprising, since I’d have thought the dip of choice was salsa, which wasn’t even mentioned in the article. I had no idea guacamole was so popular.

Other foods are also going to be consumed in mind-numbing quantities: 1.25 billion chicken wings, “enough to circle the Earth more than twice” and to provide four wings for every man, woman and child in America, according to the article. 4.4 million pizzas (mostly pepperoni), and those are just the ones from Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, and Domino’s; I’m sure many, many more will be scarfed down. Add potato chips, tortilla chips, and pretzels, and you’re looking at 102.2 million pounds of those three salty snacks alone, washed down, of course, with 111 million gallons of beer.

Gee. Do I hear the sound of food producers, brewers, supermarket managers, and pizza chain owners shouting “Cha-Ching!!!”? (Followed, perhaps, by a resounding chorus from gym and diet-franchise owners the following day.)

Read all about it at www.wsj.com, “Carrots Vie for a Spot on Game Day.”

Carrots. Who’d a thunk it?

             ‘Til next time,

                          Silence