Harold and Kumar: Fear of a Vidalia Onion Planet
By Martin Scribbs

Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle clears the way for a long-overdue national discussion on burger ethnicity. (Bill Clinton, again your nation needs you!). For just as surely as Harold and Kumar find their long trip shaped by their powers of origin, so too does the White Castle "slider" face hostility in America. The slider: 2.5 inches square, suffused with onion mist, steamed rather than broiled, its patty drilled through with five evenly spaced holes — there really is no fast-food burger more distinctive. By contrast, the ubiquitous Big Macs and Whoppers that dominate our fatty public life are about as ethnic as Tom Wopat and John Schneider. Sure, you have your thug-life Jack-in-the-Box fare, and the increasingly isolated outposts of the Roy Rogers militia offer wild-west Unaburgers, "hickory smoked without the corrupting influence of modern technology." But even these breakaway republics of meat have not so polarized the nation's telling tubbies as has the slider.

Let's face it — aside from a small minority of dedicated, insular, self-styled cravers, most Americans think White Castle's burgers sound like a bad idea. Yet in Harold and Kumar, no one says boo against White Castle on grounds of taste. What Kurt Vonnegut saw as tying together sci-fi and pornography — that both offer visions of an impossibly hospitable world — applies here, too. For the out-of-vogue slider, the film is a non-stop praisefest. Everyone in the Harold and Kumar universe accepts the desirabiliy of this squat, fragrant interloper on the American burger scene. The slider gets what Harold and Kumar want for themselves: universal acceptance by the greasy sackful, despite being vastly in the minority.

Why would a national debate on food tolerance focus on burgers to the exclusion of, say, Mexican fast food, soul food, sushi or McGriddles? Because, however improbably, America has adopted the Teuton-toned hamburger as its national food. If our stoner protagonists had been after Jujubes or beef jerky, the parallel betwen ethnicity and food would have been lost. But just as barbecues and cookouts have historically provided a common ground on which racially divided communities can come together, burgers are the lowest-common denominator of US fun food.

As participants in the great American traditions of recreational drug abuse, all-night driving and looking to get stanky with complete strangers, Harold and Kumar reclaim for their respective ethnicities serious party cred which had been arbitrarily denied. It remained only to take the most American tradition, stuffing one's face, and open it to the slider, that pariah of burgers. By storming the White Castle and being found pure of heart by Sir Galahad in the form of Doogie Howser, Harold and Kumar are permitted to drink from the grail. Sliders, by retaining their distinctive properties, restored our heros and inspired them to overcome the last vestiges of ethnic self-loathing that had dogged them throughout the film. If the doors are not now open to freely and frankly discuss the burger prejudice that has riven our country for so long, I fear that conversation may never take place.

E-mail Martin Scribbs at bluerb@yahoo.com.