Tomorrow, April 26, participating St. Louis restaurants will donate a portion of their daily earnings to Dining Out For Life, a national event that benefits and raises awareness for AIDS service organizations. With a heart full of compassion and tactlessness, Gut Check wondered which restaurants were most philanthropic, and therefore most deserving of our dollar bills for this really good cause. If you will: On a scale ranging from phoning it in a la the Gap's Project Red to UNICEF volunteers nurturing sick children abroad, how dedicated were local restaurants to supporting the charity? Yeah, yeah, we know, they're all heroes just for agreeing to participate. Everyone is a winner. But who is the real winner?

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Coke. Lots and lots of Coke.

Back when Gut Check had the metabolism of a teenage boy (because, at the time, we were in fact a teenage boy), we'd think nothing of slamming back a six-pack of ice-cold Coca-Cola over the course of a lazy afternoon. Of course, we'd also think nothing about slamming back a bacon double cheeseburger with large fries and a large Coke for lunch and then having a "snack" of an entire bag of pizza-flavored Combos only two and a half hours later. We thought nothing most of the time back then.

So we felt the slightest twinge of sympathy when we read the sad story this morning of a New Zealand woman who passed away from a heart attack at the age of 30. She died two years ago, actually, but a pathologist has now released a report linking her death in part to her own Coca-Cola habit.

How much of a habit?

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Rease Kirchner

In addition to breaking a world record, Webster University's ice cream sundae was shaped like a Slip 'n Slide. Oh, trust us, we were tempted to "dive right in."

On Wednesday, April 11, Webster University (470 East Lockwood Avenue, Webster Groves; 314-968-7128) broke the Guinness World Record for the "Longest Ice Cream Dessert." You might not have known there was a record to break, but up until Wednesday, the record was 152.2 feet. Webster blew that sad little junior sundae out of the water with its 200.3 foot ice cream sundae, which was built on the university's quad.

This epic and delicious event was the kick-off to Webster's annual Spring Fest. Gut Check spoke with campus activities program manager, Lauren Douglass, to get the full scoop on how this record-breaking event came to be.

Douglass explained that Webster's campus activities group booked the band Reel Big Fish for its annual spring concert, so the theme for the week became: "It's big. Reel Big." When brainstorming ideas for ways to jump start Spring Fest, they figured -- what's bigger than breaking a world record?

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Courtesy of Matthew Willer

Bacon Awareness

A bacon explosion is not a pack of bacon hooked up to M-80s, although eating one might make you feel a bit, er, eruptive. A traditional bacon explosion is two pounds of bacon weaved around two pounds of Italian sausage, covered in barbecue sauce and seasoning. This mass of meat is then smoked or baked before being sliced and eaten.

Local bacon enthusiast Matthew Willer's first successful bacon-explosion experiment (eight pounds, doubled from the original) left him yearning for more. A little research proved the unofficial world record for a bacon explosion was 60 pounds, so Willer immediately set his sights on a 120-pound bacon explosion.

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A scene from a wing-eating contest at last year's Midwest Wingfest.

This holiday weekend, the second annual Midwest Wingfest takes place in Fairview Heights, Illinois, on Saturday, September 3, from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m, providing a way to honor U.S. veterans while dining supreme. The event features up to 25 vendors competing for top honors in both hot-wing and gourmet categories.

Co-chairpersons Doug Shoemaker and Jere Wilmering, along with a committee of around ten people, volunteer their efforts year-round for the one-day culmination of family fun. Midwest Wingfest earned nonprofit status this year with the intention to donate proceeds to the Fairview Heights Chamber of Commerce and the USO.

"Everybody has just an absolute ton of fun while helping to raise money for an awesome cause," says Shoemaker, a former military member with a huge place in his heart for the men and women who have served the country.

Last year's event had approximately 17,000 attendees who consumed a total of about 96,000 wings. A central cook station equipped with a 48-foot refrigerated truck will hold 12,000 to 13,000 pounds of chicken wings for this year's event.

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bodybuildingpro.com

385 pounds of meat.

This is why we need the border patrol. Not only do illegal immigrants get in, but so does contraband bologna!

On Friday customs agents in St. Teresa, New Mexico, busted a truck smuggling 385 pounds of Mexican bologna stashed behind the driver's seat.

The meat was seized because it hadn't gone through the proper inspection channels.

Just how much contraband Mexican bologna is that?

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Dairy Queen Canada

Celebrating 10 tons of Dairy Queen ice cream cake with .... ice cream cake!

Oh, Canada! You've created the world's largest ice cream cake!

In honor of the Dairy Queen ice cream cake's thirtieth birthday, volunteers in Toronto built a 10.13-ton ice cream cake. It beats the previous world record holder, built in Beijing in 2006, by 500 pounds.

Forget about America being the land of all things giant. We haven't held the record since Carvel built a 12,096 pound ice cream cake in 2004.

Just how big is the Canadian Dairy Queen ice cream cake?

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Wikimedia Commons

Just in time for Easter ...

On Monday the St. Louis Area Foodbank received 460,000 eggs to distribute to organizations like day care centers, churches, and food pantries so they'll get into the hands of food insecure people who need some high protein nutrition.

MoArk donated 300,000 of the eggs, and Rose Acre Farms gave the rest.

Just how many eggs is that?

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Hardee's/Carl's Jr.

Updated Tuesday, April 5 Today the St. Louis City Department of Health issued a warning about the recalled Jennie-O Turkey Burgers as a precaution.

In an email to Gut Check, Harold L. Bailey, Jr., Public Information Officer for the St. Louis City Department of Health said, "We are not aware of any of the recalled product being in the St. Louis area, but we have contacted food establishments in the city, including child and adult daycares, to alert them. We are informing them to make sure they check the lot numbers of the product if they have it."

How do you know if you have the recalled product lurking in your freezer? Here's the label information as provided by the health department:

4-pound boxes of Jennie-O Turkey Store All Natural Turkey Burgers with seasonings. Lean white meat. Each box contains 12 1/3-pound individually wrapped burgers.

A use by date of "DEC 23 2011" and an identifying lot code of "32710" through "32780" are ink-jetted on the side panel of each box, just above the opening tear strip. Establishment number "P-7760" is located within the USDA mark of inspection on the front of each box. The products were packaged on Nov. 23, 2010, and were distributed to retail establishments nationwide.

Jennie-O's website has a special section if you have questions about the recall.

Now, back to the fun ...

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There's a lot more where that came from!

​Burger King has reformulated its chicken tenders to include actual chicken with a new shape and seasoning for the breading. To promote these new tenders, the perpetual fast-food bridesmaid is mailing coupons good for free four-piece servings. Watch your mailbox!

The company says it will give away 272 million chicken tenders -- or 68 million coupons -- in this promotion. Now, according to Burger King's website, a 4-piece order of the new tenders has 190 calories, which means that the company is giving away 12,920,000,000 calories!

More impressively, Burger King is giving away 21,080,000,000 milligrams of sodium. That's 21 million grams or 21,000 kilograms -- or just over 46,000 pounds or 23 tons.

In 2007, Mexican authorities seized 23 tons of cocaine in one of the world's largest-ever drug busts. Put it another way: That's 20,865,250 grams of cocaine. At a conservative* estimate of $50 for a gram of coke on the street, that's slightly more than $1.04 billion worth of cocaine.

Burger King is giving away the equivalent of $1.04 billion worth of cocaine in the form of the sodium in its chicken tenders.

* - Or not? Coke fiends: Please help!