America - land of food as big as your head, and bigger.

God Bless America.  I love this country.  I'm currently in California.  If I lived in California I'd be morbidly obese because of stuff like this:

but also this:

Hard to show scale here - I did try re-arranging the papayas, to little avail.

Seriously, you don't stand a chance when even a healthy choice like a papaya is super-sized.

These papayas were in Ralphs supermarket, where the shelves resemble this Andreas Gursky photo that I love, which sold for £1.7 million, making it the most expensive photo ever sold.

I get a bit Rainman when I'm in American supermarkets.  I just love this sort of shit:

  and check out this selection of pickles:

So much beauty in too much choice.

I actually went to Ralphs to check on a couple of things in the book.  Firstly, their selection of Ben and Jerry's.  Am delighted to report back on this Limited Edition flavour with an excellent pun title:

My list of dream jobs goes as follows:

AA Gill's job
Chief namer of new Ben and Jerry's flavours
Tina Fey's joke sounding board
Alec Baldwin's cleaner
Writer on The Simpsons / The Onion

The other reason I entered Ralphs was to look at their cakes.   In Pear-Shaped, Sophie goes to Ralphs in a state of heartbreak, looking for a sugary treat, and is paralysed by choice.  She looks at the cakes and they all look too big / too fake.  I wanted to check that I was on the right track - given that the book is in final proof stage, it's a bit late to start fact checking, but hey ho...  Anyway, am happy to report they sell exactly the sort of over-sized, over-fussed up baked goods that I'd imagined, comme ca:

Where is Dan Big Hands when you need him?  These cakes look normal sized, but they are not.  They are grotesque, gigantique, gargantuan, fundamentally gross parodies of normal cakes.

Finally, I leave you with what I find a sinister line-up:

As you know America is a litigious nation, so I shall reserve my jokes for another time, another place.  For now let's just give thanks that we are not chickens at the mercy of Chef Emeril's Chicken Rub.