The James Weird Awards

The James Weird Awards: Ominous Cheese, Cops Eating Pot Brownies, and the Man Who Ate His Way Through L.A.

If you thought the week’s food news couldn’t get weirder than racist bake sales, militant burger chains, and vegan strip clubs, you were mistaken. Don’t worry: The James Weird Awards are here to fill you in on what you missed.

• Green Bay Packers fans, members of the dairy industry, and cheese-eating Wisconsin citizens are up in arms about a new anti-cheese ad that will occupy a billboard close to Lambeau Field. In the ad, the Grim Reaper is shown wearing a traditional CheeseHead hat, accompanied by a warning: “Cheese Can Sack Your Health.” [ABC News]

• A man in Los Angeles has spent the past fourteen years in pursuit of one goal: to eat at every restaurant listed in the annual L.A. Zagat Restaurants Survey. That’s roughly 2,000 dining establishments — not to mention a whole lot of time stuck in traffic traversing the city’s oft-congested highways. [Eatocracy/CNN]

• Remember the giant hot dog statue that an entire town
mistook for a man
? Now citizens in Ocala, Florida, have mistaken a man dressed in an ice-cream cone costume for a member of the KKK. [Ocala Star-Banner via Eater NY]

• Death row inmate Lawrence Russell Brewer requested a veritable feast for his last meal: “two chicken fried steaks, a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, fried okra, a pound of barbecue, three fajitas, a meat lover’s pizza, a pint of ice-cream and a slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts.” Prison officials said Brewer refused to eat any of it. Annoyed at the waste, Texas officials resolved to stop the final meal tradition altogether — even after a former inmate turned restaurateur, who cooked the final meals for hundreds of prisoners on death row during his time served, offered to continue the practice at no cost to the state. [Guardian UK]

• Two police officers in Houston are accused of eating the marijuana-laced brownies they seized from a 19-year-old after arresting him for possession. Any possibility for dismissal of the claim was ruined when a local TV station found a message on the cops’ in-car computer system that read, “So HIGH … Good munchies.” That’s a move deserving of a slow clap. [HuffPo]

The James Weird Awards: Ominous Cheese, Cops Eating Pot Brownies, and the Man