Appearing in the September 2003 Issue (Volume 1, Issue #4) of Lil's Experimental Ezine
© 2003 Water Pistol Publishing

Siddown – I'll Fix You a Sandwich

by P. Gomes

My daughter, the now web-infamous Mizz Jillian, reads too much. And for me (who reads five novels, umpteenth magazines and scores of 'net bytes-o-wisdom in a month's span), to voice that thought at all is saying something. Between the two of us, we're the cause of our mailperson needing scheduled visits to a chiropractor. See, we do mail order; we're freakish that way. We despise that (mostly) feminine custom of Shopping. Hate stores, hate the mall, hate the crowds and get utterly overwhelmed in Barnes and Noble, always forgetting what we went in for and usually going home with three bookmarks and an unblemished, aesthetically-pleasing journal because our choices are vast and mind-boggling.

I'm digressing; I do that a lot. Stick with me; I'm making a point here. Anyway, to make a short story long, Mizz Jillian shared a new factoid with me over breakfast: forensic examiners, when they are doing DNA testing, must first separate the human DNA from — are you ready for this — bovine DNA. You heard right, folks…bovine DNA.

It seems that we load our future hamburgers with so many chemicals that the beef we consume does not break down in our digestive system, but assimilates instead. Lingering, mixing with our very building blocks. Ewww!

Although that little idiom turned my stomach, I'm not much of a partaker in red meat, so it didn't really bother me . . . at first. Then I got to thinking: I don't eat chicken, either, if I can avoid it. To me, chicken is just fish with wings and I do so hate fish, but I do eat eggs. Mass quantities of eggs, eighteen a week. And I've always had my suspicions about what it is that Frank and Son pump into those glorious yellow birds. Sure, they claim it's marigolds, but now I'm worried — just what the hell am I putting in my mouth?

I'm scared. Scared enough to start buying only local eggs and herein lies a new problem. Farmers all over this country cut the feed for these dumb clucks (and they always have) with whatever's handy and plentiful. I live in New England (a-yuh), what's plentiful here are shells: clam, mussel, and quahog shells. Which means our local eggs taste (to me, anyway) like fish…and I do so hate fish.

Yeah, this too makes me a freak in my salty neck of the woods. It's not just fish; I can't stand seafood in general. "Fuh Chriss' sake, ya live in Massachusetts, ya know how much them New Yawkahs'd pay for this crap?!!" I'm surrounded by clam connoisseurs, scallop specialists and lobster lovers . . . aficionados all.

Pink, naked shrimp looks like bugs, I don't give a damn how much it "goes for" retail. Try as I might, I cannot swallow the nauseating things. Crabs have skinny-stalked eyes that see the steamy pot before you toss 'em in and that is too much for me to bear. They scream, you know, when you put the lid on and send them to Hell. And periwinkles —(or peeny-winkles, as we Canucks call 'em) —don't even get me started. It doesn't take an Einstein to figure out what a bowlful of those slimy, little rollie green things resemble!

So what does this mean? Must I travel out of the region to get a decent egg? Will I have to start raising my own chickens? Oh, God . . . like my neighbors haven't already petitioned for my departure, sideshow Horror Writer that I am. I grow my own veggies as it is, and to tell you that last year's tomato crop was pitiful is the understatement of the decade!

I'm really stressed. I'd love to go for ice cream to calm my nerves, but I just read the latest report form the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). They're calling it "Coronary in a Cone" — how scary is that?

Premium ice creams, with those magical add-ins like candy and cookie crumbles, are packed with more fat and calories than three Quarter Pounders flipped off Mickey Dee's grill! Tack on three more exclamation points — this is a serious issue. The study cites Friendly's (large) Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Cyclone, which is one of my guilty pleasures. Vanilla ice cream topped with peanut butter sauce, hot fudge, marshmallow, whipped topping, chocolate sprinkles and Reese's Pieces add up to 1,470 calories and 28 grams of pure-D saturated fat . . . holy crap!

I'm not lecturing you; as far as I'm concerned, eat, drink and be merry. Just some fodder for thought. I was going to say food for thought, but that'd be blasphemous considering the theme of this rant. I'm going now. I need to lie down; I've a depressive episode coming on.

Sources: News release, CSPI, July 2003, MSN WebMD Inc. 2003