Edwin blogged earlier today about Buca di Beppo in Garden Grove attempting to make the world's largest bowl of pasta (the previous contender weighed in at 9,797 pounds). We called for more details and spoke to Mike Vallone, the on-site PR guy from BRAINtrust Marketing and Communications in Las Vegas (where else?), to ask what exactly was going to happen to the food after it was prepared.
Dished out to the first 15,000 people? Given to Second Harvest? Hardly… the pasta had been sitting in the pool outside for quite some time when I went on my lunch hour to take the pictures.
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No. According to Spence Johnston of the Las Vegas PR firm BRAINtrust Marketing & Communication, it's going to be donated to a local farmer as livestock feed. Five tons of food will be given to the pigs. That's 15,000 servings of pasta being turned into garbage feed (the government's term), heat treated and fed–meatballs and all–to the pigs. Good thing they're beef meatballs; we wouldn't want pigs eating pigs, but pigs eating cows is okay.
According to BRAINtrust's Mike Vallone, Shay Carl, the YouTube comedian, was to dive into the concoction. Yummy, spaghetti with meatballs and body hair. Hope the pigs have floss.
To their credit, Buca di Beppo will be donating an equivalent amount of food that hasn't been sitting for hours in 68°F weather to local homeless shelters. A noble gesture and much appreciated, but not one that mitigates the fact that with so many hungry people both here and abroad (Haiti, anyone?) they're wasting 10,000 pounds of food. Planet Hollywood (which now owns Buca di Beppo) ought to be ashamed of themselves.
This was a stupid, wasteful, poorly conceived publicity stunt intended, presumably, to make future readers of the Guinness World Records suddenly desire to go out for Italian-American food. Unfortunately for Buca di Beppo, as Stick A Fork In It reader mr justin so eloquently put it in the comments on Edwin's post, “Last time I opened one of their books up was to see the world's biggest breasts, when I was 10.”
