Even if you have never read a single Garfield comic, or watched an episode of Garfield & Friends, or seen any Garfield movie, you know one thing about him: Garfield loves lasagna. He also loves coffee, and ice cream, and cookies, and pizza, and just about anything else in Jon’s fridge. To be Garfield is to eat, and eat a lot; eat until you pass out in the lasagna tray, and your tummy is so round you can pick it up and hug it like a teddy bear. He is the avatar of unabashed gluttony. This is why we love him.
Garfield’s love of food has been part of his character design from the beginning. In Jim Davis’s first comic on June 19, 1978, we meet Garfield with a simple request: “feed me.” Shortly thereafter he eats a rubber mouse, his owner Jon’s steak, a burger, and just misses getting at a whole ham. He is disdainful of cat food, utilitarian brown slop meant only to fulfill his base nutritional needs, and notes “the bouquet” isn’t to his liking. He knows he deserves more.
It takes less than a month for Garfield to declare his love for lasagna; On July 15, 1978, we see him just before he gorges on “nature’s most perfect food,” beginning a running gag of Garfield housing entire pans of the stuff as Jon looks on helplessly. The trailer for the new Garfield movie is nearly all about how much he is eating, culminating in a lasagna meal. And Garfield’s love for food extends outside his canon narratives. It’s likely if you’ve encountered Garfield, it’s in his novelty accessory form, feasting on ham and burgers on a mug, carrying a giant hoagie on a sticker, or facing a dreaded Monday with an ever-steaming cup of coffee.
Garfield’s eating isn’t just some compulsion. With the Garfield comics, Davis transforms eating from an animal instinct into a joy. Garfield is happy to eat. He flops over in satisfaction, and you can practically hear him moaning in pleasure. “All I ever do is eat and sleep. There must be more to a cat’s life than that,” he ponders in one strip. “But I hope not.”
Eating can be fraught, because society has made it difficult to do right. Good food is often expensive, whether that means a nice meal out or nutritious ingredients at the grocery store. And while it’s good to recognize the labor that goes into creating food, the intertwined forces of fatphobia and wellness culture make it easy to believe that the consumption of food should also be a chore. If you’re not counting macros or drinking prebiotics or optimizing your meals with whatever an adaptogen is, you’re somehow not doing eating as well as you should.
There is nothing optimized about Garfield, or perhaps he is optimized towards something else. Garfield is the part of us that doesn’t give a shit about all of that. Garfield eats lasagna because it tastes good. He dreams of tuna-flavored ice cream and owning a spaghetti farm, impractical endeavors that would do nothing but make him happy. He is a bright orange reminder that we should all be so lucky, to eat and sleep and not have any other worries.
Isn’t that what we were put on earth to do? Money is fake, borders are fake, credit scores are younger than I am. Most of the things that make us miserable are of our own making. But then again, so is lasagna. We can choose to make better things, and gleefully scarf them down. And when we do, Garfield will greet us with a smile, picking tomato from his teeth, and ask us if we have anything more to eat.
Johnny Acurso is an illustrator in Portland, Oregon specializing in pop nostalgia.
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