I have several friends and relatives who suffer celiac disease, Crohn's or food intolerances brought on by autoimmune disorders. They're forced to monitor everything they eat. The rest of us, I'm afraid, have forgotten that 1 Timothy 4:1-7 is a part of the Bible. I'll let you look it up. There's something nice about our own fingers turning the pages, searching.
A decade-and-a-half ago, eggs were anathema. After about five years, potatoes were starchy orbs of evil. A bit later, the appearance of high fructose corn syrup an any food label sent us screaming for the hills, clawing at the hives covering our bodies. All the while, children over the rest of the world went hungry and got thinner and ate whatever our horribly sinful and very bad industrialized mega-farms could send them.
Now it's 2011 and gluten is very. Very. Bad.
So what's coming? Which food item will be the next no-no? As you know (well, maybe you didn't) I like to be at the forefront of every backlash. Maybe this time I should just start the new rage. I suggested this to the Spouse at lunch. (By the way, I actually was eating brown rice at the time.)
"What should I plug as the next Bad Food?" I asked, "Carrot sticks?"
"B-12, maybe," he said. Then he intoned in a news-headline sort of voice: "Independent studies implicate a questionable amino acid..."
"Right," I said, "It has to be something that's difficult to avoid eating. Something that drives us all outside, grazing like Nebuchadnezzar."
All it would take is a good marketing campaign. I could release a wide-eyed, wow-I-never-realized-the-extent-of-this-crisis documentary, followed by a few press releases in health periodicals. Then we get a Hollywood starlet to come forward, serving humanity by telling us how the Bad Food messed up her child. (No matter that she bore the baby well past the normal child bearing age, because she was doing who-knows-what during the child bearing years. We can make those sort of details disappear.) Maybe she could talk to Katie Couric or the man with the bow tie. I forget his name.
Prior to all this, I concoct a line of drinks and snack foods bearing colorful claims that they're One Hundred Percent **** Free! Whatever **** is. Since I created the hysteria in the first place, everyone gets night sweats until they have their hands on my products, and I make millions.
You're all very sweet to me, so after this all comes down I'll give you eight thousand bucks apiece.
