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arning: Once you know the truth about Seinfeld, you'll never be
able to watch it the same way again. It will gnaw at you the way
Kramer eats an apple -- stem, core, seeds and all.
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| [Times art by Nikki Life; studio photo by Brian Baer] |
Junior Mints, non-fat yogurt, Chinese restaurants, the Soup Nazi. All have done more than provide the backdrops for the sitcom that ends its run May 14. Entire episodes have been engineered around nothing more than a Pez dispenser. Think about it for a minute, keeping in mind that the TV Jerry must be the only adult in the world who eats Jell-O pudding cups. The episodes involving food will come back to you faster than a burrito with nuclear hot sauce.
There was the episode where Jerry's nemesis, Newman, imagined Kramer as a golden-brown turkey. There was the time Jerry mugged an old lady on the street for a marble rye. Remember when Jerry freaked out because his date wouldn't try a taste of pie and she wouldn't tell him why? What about the episode when Elaine fails a drug test because she has been eating poppy seed muffins every day? Or the one when Kramer cooked dinner in the shower? And on and on and on, yada, yada, yada.
| Seinfeld Signs Off -- a Web tribute and archive from the St. Petersburg Times. |
When a woman Kramer is dating gets her little toe sliced off by a street sweeper, he of the mile-high hair rescues the severed appendage and rushes it to the hospital. What does he pack the toe in? A Cracker Jack box full of ice.
When George is driven nearly insane by what he perceives as a car dealership's attempt to "screw him," the final insult becomes a malfunctioning candy machine. The marooned Twix bar, "the only candy with the cookie crunch," is his windmill as he launches his Quixotic tirade.
It makes sense that a show set in New York, centered on four baby boomers who are centered on themselves, would center on food. Food in New York is a different thing from food in Clearwater or Des Moines or Phoenix.
Food is everywhere in the city. You can't walk three blocks without passing a pizza joint. Every few steps there's a little market that sells fruit and soda and cookies and other staples that fuel New Yorkers. New York City has more than 5,000 restaurants, from the trendiest of the trendy to hole-in-the-wall spots where you can get breakfast for under $5 from a waitress who needs the afternoon off to audition for an Off-Off Broadway show.
Although food is everywhere in New York, it is also nowhere. The mega-grocery store with the Olympic-size parking lot? It doesn't exist in the Big Apple.
In a nutshell, food is an obsession in New York, and Seinfeld is the quintessential New York show.
Consider Seinfeld's birth: It's 2 a.m. Jerry and his comedy pal Larry David are at an all-night New York deli talking about creating a sitcom.
"We were standing there talking about the products in the store, and I suddenly said to Jerry, "This is what the show should be about -- nothing,' " David has said.
How could a show born in a deli not grow up smelling like marble rye?
* * *
The shows about food can be divided into three categories: Issues with Candy, Issues with Restaurants and Food as Power. Let's take a look:
Issues with Candy
Kramer pulls out a box of Junior Mints in an operating room while he and Jerry are observing a splenectomy. When Kramer tries to force Jerry to eat one, a cool, refreshing mint flies into the air and lands in the patient's abdominal cavity.
Jerry calmly places a Pez dispenser on Elaine's knee during a piano recital performance by a woman George is dating. The sight of the plastic candy holder sends Elaine into fits of laughter, disrupting the recital. (In this same episode, Kramer convinces a comic to dump Gatorade over the head of a nightclub owner after a softball game. The owner catches pneumonia and dies, and the comic becomes a drug addict.)
Elaine's boyfriend Jake Jarmel breaks up with her when he finds out she stopped to buy a box of Jujyfruits before rushing to the hospital after she learned he has been in an accident.
George admits he eats Snickers bars when he's talking on the phone with women. It's his way of simulating sex noises.
Issues with Restaurants
In one of the best early shows, Jerry, George and Elaine spend an entire episode waiting for a table at a Chinese restaurant. At the end of the show, they finally give up and walk out. Seconds later, the maitre 'd calls them.
Elaine can't get a Chinese restaurant to deliver to her because she lives outside the delivery zone. To get the food, she sets up camp in the cleaning supply closet of an apartment complex within the delivery area. Her scheme is uncovered, and she is denied the food.
Jerry's decision to help struggling Pakistani restaurateur Babu Rhatt ends with Babu being deported and vowing revenge against Jerry.
Kramer gets the gang hooked on the soup of the terrorizing "Soup Nazi." But they all are banned when they don't behave correctly. "No soup for you," he shouts. The Soup Nazi is based on a real-life New York soup vendor who says the real Jerry is an idiot.
During a visit to his parents' Florida condominium complex, Jerry balks at eating the Early Bird Special. "I am not going to force-feed myself a steak at 4:30 to save a couple of bucks," he shrieks. His refusal contributes to his father's impeachment as condo board president. (This episode is a food two-fer. The lady whom Jerry mugged for the marble rye in New York is a resident of the elder Seinfelds' condo complex. She recognizes Jerry and votes to impeach his father.)
Kramer protests the opening of a Kenny Rogers' Roasters in the neighborhood, only to get hooked on the chicken.
Food as Power
George ingratiates himself with George Steinbrenner by bringing him a calzone every day for lunch, only to be banished from the pizzeria.
Kramer accepts unlimited coffee in a lawsuit, much to the dismay of his Johnnie Cochran-style attorney.
Elaine's boss, Mr. Lippman, steals her idea to open a shop selling muffins, sans stumps.
Elaine is talking to NBC president Russell Dalrymple about ketchup when he peeks at her cleavage and falls in love. His love interest saves Jerry and George's sitcom pilot.
The gang discovers fat-free yogurt, only to find they are gaining weight. A sample taken to a laboratory reveals that there is indeed fat in the yogurt.
Neat-freak Jerry is grossed out when he finds out restaurateur Popi doesn't wash his hands after going to the bathroom and then heads into the kitchen to make pizza dough.
* * *
Need further proof that Seinfeld is really about food? Tonight's
episode, 9 p.m. on WFLA-Ch. 8, has Elaine panicking about how
to replace a $29,000 slice of cake that her catalog guru boss,
J. Peterman, bought at an auction. You can guess what happened
to the cake.
-- Information from Newsweek, Entertainment Weekly and The Entertainment
Weekly Seinfeld Companion was used in this report.
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