Upsetting Day: Food Boy! (Patreon)

I had a pretty great childhood, but sometimes I feel like something was missing, and now I finally know what that was! I needed an angsty teen dramedy about an insufferable rich boy who has the power to shoot bologna from his hands. Somehow I missed 2008’s The Adventures Of Food Boy (High School Superhero).

I have an enormous amount of respect for this terrible movie. It’s an independent, family-friendly film that decided to script a massive amount of lore for its super dumb superpower. They really tried to make this work, but the tone is all over the place. The end result is a movie mashup of Captain Underpants and She’s All That.

The premise is silly. Food Boy makes food with his hands, sometimes by accident, and it goes everywhere, making a big mess. Classic comedy premise any ten year old would go wild for. Except, for some reason, they made Food Boy a junior in high school with a bunch of existential dread about his future and the meaning of life. He’s worried he’ll never amount to anything, AND he wrecked a bathroom with mustard! It’s zany but also dead serious.

My theory is that the original Food Boy script was much wackier, but then in 2005, Batman Begins came out and some producer was like, “Food Boy should be darker, grittier... his bologna shooting powers should torture him.” Then somehow, that happened.

Also, they made Food Boy the worst. He’s an ungrateful little shit. He starts the movie being late for school, bullying his friends, and insulting his grandmother. Granted, his grandmother served him frozen green beans and carrots for dinner, which she said she steamed, seasoned, and then refroze as a revolutionary new cooking method, which is bonkers. The next day Food Boy tells his friends he’s been thinking about his grandma and her “long, boring, pathetic life,” which convinced him he has to get into Harvard to avoid her horrible fate, so he’s going to run for class president.

He’s running against a guy named Garrett, who is so cool that when Food Boy tells his dad and grandma that he’s running against him even, they are like, “Woah, what? But Garrett is so popular!” To further underscore that Garrett is cool, they have him hold a football for the entire movie, even when he debates Food Boy for class president.

Food Boy’s powers manifest X-Men style when he’s stressed about the debate, and they cause him to accidentally fling lunch meat at cool Garrett, and into the crowd. For some reason, the crowd loves being covered in boy-secreted meat. Food Boy runs to the bathroom, and his friends follow him, calling for help because their buddy is making big meaty slaps against the bathroom wall. It's the worst way to handle your friend suddenly squirting food. What narcs!

Everyone in school thinks wrecking a bathroom is a hilarious prank, and while Food Boy is expelled for two days, he becomes immensely popular, and even though his name was removed from the ballot for class president, he wins by write-in vote. So, in the universe of this film, if you are a nerd and you start throwing lunch meat at people for attention and fill eight toilets with vomit, you suddenly become the most popular boy in school.

If you're wondering how Food Boy's powers are shown, we get one perfect CGI shot of Food Boy creating bread, but the rest of the time, it's all done with practical effects. And it rules. Marvel should start running spurting baked bean tubes through Tony Stark's little outfit. You just can't beat practical effects! There's no better joy than watching Food Boy Frankenstein around as mustard shoots out of his sleeves. It never doesn't look like something has gone horribly wrong with a prop.

Food Boy is troubled by the meat, so he runs home covered in mustard, and to keep the movie going, his grandmother just bursts into his room and is like, "Does this involve food exploding out of your hands?" Such a good guess! Now we get an info dump of the Food Boy lore, along with a brief training montage.

Food Boy's powers are passed down genetically, but they skipped his father, who we'll call Non-Food Dad. His grandmother is also a Food Boy. The first rule of Food Boy is if you talk about Food Boy, the food will no longer taste good. The more people know your secret, the worse it tastes, and if you're not careful, you'll be pumping out airplane food forever, and you're basically worthless. People will be like, "What's the deal with this chicken you launched into my face? It's DRY!"

Food Boy powers kick in when you are exactly 5900 days old because there are 59 food groups. This is simply because Food Boy's ancestors didn't group food well. The first food group is beans, the seventh is potatoes, all potatoes, and the 59th is chocolate, which means it's the hardest to make. You would think that would come up again but it will not, I promise you.

Food Boy can't make gold, or money, or anything cool. He can only produce something edible. I had a friend in high school who ate a dollar bill on a dare, but I don't think that counts. However, there's nothing to stop Food Boy from pumping out a fifty gallon drum of fine champagne or a two gallon ziploc bag of caviar and selling that – other than people with questions about why the caviar is so warm and tastes like a magic boy shit it out of his hands.

Producing too much food will make Food Boy tired, but how much is "too much" changes wildly based on what the story requires. For instance, the three hundred bologna sandwiches he wrecked the bathroom with didn't make him break a sweat, but he almost passes out when he launches way less plain bologna into a crowd two scenes later.

The final thing Food Boy learns is the most upsetting to him. He says his gift will only be good for late night snacks while he's studying at Harvard, and his grandmother tells him, "Every person with the food gift has to work toward adding a new link in the chain of food." That's why she's working so hard on her insane cookbook, for Food Boy power reasons.

Food Boy thinks this means that he can't go to an Ivy League school because he has to become a chef, even though we later learn that his great great grandfather, who had the gift, became a food scientist, which is probably a thing you can learn at a fancy school and make a bunch of money doing. However, if he could be a Food Boy and go to Harvard there would be no conflict so...that's the conflict. I should also point out that Food Boy only wants to go to Harvard to become a stock broker or plastic surgeon and make money. No altruistic reasons, he’s just pissed off that he might not get to own a lambo one day. My heart goes out to Food Boy!

Anyway, when Food Boy returns to school, wrecking a bathroom has made him popular. He continues to use his gift to gain even more popularity, doing a magic trick where he launches meat into the crowd at a pep rally. You know, because high schoolers think magic is the coolest. No one is cooler in high school than a teen magician. "Conjure meat! Conjure meat!" as the kids say.

All of the food launching does cause Food Boy academic trouble. He's unexpectedly not chosen as captain of the golf team because of his "pranks," and he gets a D on an exam because he couldn't control his powers and it was too smeared in peanut butter for the teacher to read. Food Boy gets super angsty about how his gift is ruining his life by making him a big, popular dummy.

The final straw is when he performs in the school magic show wearing a wizard hat and cape (again, this is treated as so cool, everyone in school thinks wizards totally fuck), but his powers go haywire. Instead of a watermelon, he accidentally pelts his friend/love interest, who is otherwise completely unimportant to the story, with water, and she slips, twisting her ankle before a big track meet.

Food Boy, now desperate to get rid of his powers, learns that if he doesn't use them at all on his 59th day of having them, he will lose them forever. Instantly, Food Boy is ready to ditch this power. Forget being special, this loser wants to work on Wall Street, and he can't do that with salami hands.

All he has to do is not use the powers that he hates for one full day, but he ends up starting a food fight with cool Garrett, and when Garrett slips and hits his head, Food Boy begrudgingly uses his powers to spew his grandmother's weird cooked and refrozen vegetables recipe into a bag to put on Garrett's head. Then he and his friends dump Garrett in a trash can and wheel him away from the fight. This is treated as if Food Boy is saving his life for some reason. Garrett isn't dying or anything; he bonked his noodle. He's fully conscious and mildly annoyed. He threw away his dream of non-mustard hands to pointlessly rest a bag of vegetables on his enemy's head.

Food Boy has chosen the side of good! He actually says, "Goodbye stock exchange, hello soup kitchen," before using his powers to help Garrett, as if he's resigning himself to a life of poverty. This kid is on the golf team, and he's literally magic. That should at least get him waitlisted at Columbia.

Maybe this movie was intended to be a villain origin story for Food Man. He's a bitter chef who blames his powers for never getting into Harvard and launches full frozen turkeys at Batman's head while robbing the golf store. "No! What have I done!" he'll say before placing a tiny plastic bag of carrots on Batman's head. "Why can't I escape this terrible need to heal the bonked!?"

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