According to a recent study, football fans consume more than 5 million pizzas on Super Bowl Sunday, along with 14,500 tons of chips, 4,000 tons of popcorn and (this is my personal favorite) more than eight million pounds of guacamole. At recent bashes, fans have choked down 250 gallons of crawfish etouffee, 150,000 SnoBalls and 14,000 shrimp and washed it all down with the help of more than 14 miles of soft-drink pipeline.

After Thanksgiving, the Super Bowl is the second-biggest day of food consumption of the year. In fact, number-crunching weasels have discovered that more people can recall what they ate during last year's game (75%) than can correctly ID the winning team (42%). For those of you scoring at home, that would be the St. Louis (rack of) Rams.

All of this grotesque, game-day gorging is appropriate. Because more than anything, what we celebrate during Super Bowl week is our culture's collective gluttony.

Let's face it, we are gluttons for food.

Gluttons for money.

Gluttons for violence.

Gluttons for sex.

Gluttons for the spotlight.

When it comes to the Super Bowl, we have become just like that guy in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life: the morbidly obese man who sits down at a restaurant and continues to shovel food and drink down his gullet until, finally, one last wafer-thin mint causes him to explode.

"How are you feeling sir?" asks the waiter.

"Better," replies the man, "... better get me a bucket."

The question we should be asking now is, what, if anything, will eventually cause us to erupt?

Or, as I fear, have we developed an infinite amount of stomach space when it comes to our collective ability to devour everything related to the Super Bowl? How else can you explain our desire to gloss over Art Modell's traitorous past? Or our willingness to swallow this garbage that somehow Ray Lewis is a ... victim? Can our appetite for football be so insatiable that we forget the real tragedy of the Lewis and Rae Carruth cases? Mainly, that three people are dead and a child has now essentially been orphaned?

A while back in Phoenix I watched a grown man eagerly dive into a steaming pile of manure -- and gleefully rub it all over himself -- in order to make the 11 o'clock news and win some silly Super Bowl contest.

Then, last night, I watched Ravens coach Brian Billick basically do the same thing.

The rest of the week, it will be hard for anyone to come across as more disingenuous or hypocritical than Billick did during his little temper tantrum at Monday's press conference. Remember, folks, this is the same man who wore down hundreds of video camera batteries while tirelessly promoting himself during the last several years.

I watched Billick (you know, the "offensive genius" whose team went more than a month without scoring a TD) and all I could think was, Better get me a bucket.

My stomach gurgled. It turned. It burned. I could feel myself already getting dangerously bloated on SB BS.

I ran to the bathroom and searched my bag for an antacid that could somehow neutralize the impending hellacious heartburn of the latest triple-X Super Bowl.

Unfortunately, that would require a tablet the size and weight of a manhole cover.

David Fleming, a senior writer for The Magazine, shares his off-center perspective each Tuesday on ESPNMAG.com. E-mail flemfile@aol.com.