What Does Olive Garden’s Never-Ending Pasta Have to Do With Voting Rights?

When I was 20 years old, I went to my hometown Olive Garden with one goal in mind: For less than $10, I would attempt to eat so much bottomless pasta in their so-called Never-Ending Pasta deal that either the staff would be forced to stop me and my idiot friends from putting the franchise into the red, or I would die trying. In either scenario, I planned to get a serious bang for my buck. No one asked to see my ID. 

I ate a ton of linguine alfredo (probably four bowls — not heroic and definitely not financially devastating to Olive Garden), shamefully tapped the mat, and went back to my friends’ place to smoke too much weed. The next morning, on the four hour drive back to my college town, I started feeling a burning, cramping pain in my abdomen. By that evening, I was curled up in pain and could barely walk. I drove myself to the emergency room, confessed my sins, and learned I had a handful of gallstones that the buckets of creamy, fatty, carby pasta had aggravated into an attack. 

Should I have been carded before carrying out such a reckless crime against my own wellbeing? Maybe. But this week, right-wing groups and Republicans have started repeating a lie that Olive Garden’s promotional deals are more secure than the country’s elections. 

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