Written by Skip Miller
One of my wife’s friends was venting about the horrible things people eat, things that make them fat and suck out their will power. Some of it isn’t even food, she fumed. Some of it is alien material that was concocted in Frankenstein’s kitchen. Most of it is deep-fried—nobody in these United States of America can make it through a week without consuming deep-fried morsels.
The woman who said these things sent herself back to the machine shop for an overhaul when she turned 40. She had this propped and that enlarged and that realigned, putty on this, fiberglass on that and all of it brought together at a streamlined waist.
She doesn’t work out, but she poses at places where other people work out. She smiles and struts and offers all of the correct postures while saying snitty things about other people and what they eat. Having been machined gave her license to do this.
I was grievously wounded by her rant. Doesn’t she understand that people like me fell victim to a conspiracy? I know eating french fries is like playing cholesterol roulette. I don’t want to eat the wrong things, and I yearn to reclaim my healthy youth long enough to do a pushup. All of that, however, has been erased by deceit and injustice.
I am victim of this eater-beware market. I am relentlessly hornswoggled by advertising that renders the truth irrelevant while using the old words to play with my mind. What is not really ice cream is sold as ice cream. Calling some of that stuff juice is about as accurate as next week’s weather forecast. Who came up with the idea of Healthy Choice hotdogs?
The food doesn’t make me fat, it’s the stuff they put in it. I can eat beef until the cows come home and not gain an ounce. Once they add their salt and MSG and all of that, I can’t even read a menu without putting on poundage.
They say I have man-sized appetites and should go to the fast food joints and order the bacon cheeseburger that can only be moved by chain lift. They don’t tell me the cheeseburger is laden with weapons of chemical warfare. That hotdogs, fried chicken and meat-showered pizza are what happens when Dr. Jekyll has too much time on his hands.
They don’t tell me that most of the calorie assessments of restaurant meals are purposely kept low so I don’t get the wrong idea. Nor will they answer this question: If it’s bad for people why are you selling it?
Instead they send a dolled-up humanoid who says hurtful things about my inability to see my own feet from the standing position. They sprinkle my television time with fantasy-like commercials about candy bars and killer tacos and cheese products that do not contain cheese. They ease their conscience by giving me an hourly dose of the life insurance spiel.
Why won’t they tell us what is in our food and our water? If it’s not whipped cream, what is it? How much high fructose corn syrup is in a can of soda? Exactly what is maltodextrin? Diglycerides? Flavor enhancers?
Grocery stores should hand out ingredient glossaries and scorecards. Right there at the point of purchase we should learn where our meat was processed so we know what to trash the next time there is a recall. We should be able to keep score, thus predicting our chance of survival until our next grocery store visit. We should be able to find a label that reads, Contains no natural ingredients.
As for my wife’s friend, she was neither fat nor skinny, healthy or doomed. She was machined.