The Dangers of the Nothing Burger

       “Well, you’d never believe a vegan burrito could change your whole outlook on life, but that’s what happened to me,” Larry Johnson wrote on the INTER-NET. He closed the window and shut down the system. Larry honestly felt a lot better, but he was still very weak. He had many of the symptoms the nutritionist had said to look for in a scarvy patient; still he remained optimistic. Scarvy wasn’t real. It was a make-believe disease, or so Larry believed.

            In 2035 the fast-food chains introduced the “nothing burger,” a sandwich that was completely obscene on the fast-food scene because it had absolutely no nutritional value what-so-ever. Doctors had prophesied that if a person were to eat nothing but nothing burgers for over a month, he’d probably die. Say what you will, but it was a tasty burger. Within several months, the nothing burger was the best-selling item at every fast-food joint in the country. The first human died of the disease known as scarvy about three months after the first Real Earth Foods opened its doors. Her name was Marcy Scott. She died from severely low blood sugar, but she was not a diabetic. This is not a fictional story but rather an account of the hostile takeover of America’s food supply. Real Earth Foods was bought by the company Saint Monto, a corporation not short on cash. Within several years, hundreds of Real Earth Foods began to pop up around the United States. At first, they sold normal groceries, but as they began to expand their operation, they began to expand the number of nothing burgers they sold and lessen everything else.

            And so it went for Larry Johnson until one morning he was standing in line and realized that the Real Whole Foods store that once sold many things, today was selling nothing but nothing burgers.

            “Where are the freedom fries?” he asked, but the attendant ignored him.

            “What about the Buffalo wings?” he continued to complain, but was met with blank stares.

            The buffalo was long extinct, so Larry didn’t even understand that buffalos don’t have wings.

            Larry felt dizzy and had to sit down. His stomach was gripped by a paralysis which seemed to say, Stop feeding me this garbage and give me real food.

            Mr. Johnson paid at the register, sat down and downed three nothing burgers. Although his stomach was full, he didn’t feel any better. Larry had lately, more and more frequently, been feeling ghastly. The other day he had trouble lifting the container of water out of the refrigerator. He had gone to the nutritionist and had been told to stick himself with a needle twice a day with a sugary syrup called glucose, but Larry had begun to wonder if maybe the Real Earth Foods nothing burger was the problem in the first place. He vaguely recalled news broadcasts claiming nothing burgers weren’t real food. The burgers weren’t even made from real meat. No beef. No cow. They were made from the by-products of meat, whatever that meant; Larry wasn’t sure he wanted to find out. There was even an ingredient the news referred to as pink slime. No beef, no cow, just pink slime. Yuck.

            He came home and holo-phoned his nutritionist again. The nutritionist was snacking on something that Larry had never seen before. It was white and looked like pictures Larry had seen of cheese.

            “What is that?” Larry questioned.

            “Nothing,” he countered quickly putting it away. He almost slipped and said, “It’s a nothing burger.” It obviously wasn’t a nothing burger. The nutritionist, at least from Larry’s perspective, seemed to imply that Larry’s condition was somehow his own fault. The nutritionist seemed to be shaming and shunning him, as if Larry was the problem. “The FDA advocates you eat a nothing burger three times daily. You don’t want to get scarvy,” he warned. “Inject yourself three times daily and you’ll be fine.”

            “Whatever happened to the hotdogs, cheese sticks and chicken fingers?” Larry complained.

            Larry briefly wondered if chickens had fingers. He didn’t think so, but he had really never seen a live chicken before.

             “They were unhealthy and thus deemed a threat,” his nutritionist said bluntly, and then the screen went blank. Larry thought him insincere and in a damn hurry. Why was he in such a rush to get off the phone? Larry began to wonder if maybe it was the nothing burger that was unhealthy.

            Over the next few days Larry’s condition worsened; Larry felt so sick, it was not out of the question to believe he was dying. He had trouble doing menial tasks like getting dressed or going to the bathroom. On Tuesday, he couldn’t even get off the couch and had to call in sick for work. Larry went to the hospital, but the doctor was too busy to see him. They did offer him an appointment six months from now. Larry booked the appointment but wasn’t sure he would make it that long. On the way home, he had to stop twice just to rest, once on a bench, and once he just fell on the side of the road. He lay there hoping someone would come and help him, but no one did; eventually he staggered to his feet and headed home.

            When Larry got home, he logged on to his computer. He still had a password that he’d kept long ago to a long-outdated source of information known as the INTER-NET. The INTER-NET was once used to store information but was now mainly just a source of communication and pornography sites. Larry ran a search of newspapers about the “nothing burger and its history.” Larry found several old news sites, rallying against the nothing burger, before Congress passed the Freedom of Corporate Entities Act. Larry found this excerpt, which was dated before the act was passed:

            -The condition of SCARVY as defined by the government and the CDC, does not exist. It is rather a lack of nutrition in which the patient’s blood sugar is extremely low. It is akin to SCURVY but is caused by a lack of protein rather than a lack of vitamin C.

                                                                                    -The American Journal of Medicine.

             Larry couldn’t believe his eyes, he read awestruck about how Congress in 2040 passed a law that basically made it legal for corporations to openly lie to the public about health issues. Out of the disease scurvy the government created a new disease, scarvy.  It should have been called The Corporate Secrecies Act, Larry thought. It was shortly after that the corporation Saint Manto bought ninety percent of the media in the United States. Obviously, after that there were very few articles about the nothing burger other than how cheap and nutritious it was.  By 2040 the disease known as scarvy was rampant among Americans; over one hundred thousand had already died, but there was not a peep among the FDA or government officials.

            Larry began to keep a journal of his thoughts on the INTER-NET, and it wasn’t long before he was contacted by a member of the resistance. The message was simple and in black and white on his screen:

            You aren’t sick.

            The problem isn’t you,

      It’s the food.

      We can’t talk here,

      Meet me “outside.”

            Larry was unsure what the message meant by “outside.” He responded quickly, but got no clarification. He went outside but there was no one out there. For the next several weeks, he did nothing. Eventually, Larry Johnson got so lethargic, especially after his morning, brunch, late lunch and evening meals, he could barely move. With his one free hand, he began to search for the meaning of “outside.” On the BLACK INTER-NET, a place where it was technically illegal to buy and sell goods, he found that “outside” generally meant places where government ceased to function. Since he was close to the inner city of Chicago, Larry figured that was the best place to search for the “outside.”

            After taking a super shot of glucose, which cost him three months’ pay, Larry went out to search for the truth. The cities had become ghastly communities of crime and anti-government sentiment. A polluted haze settled over them which gave them a ghostly, lonely feeling. Chicago, Detroit (which had been renamed Det-riot), New York, Cleveland, Washington DC and Atlanta were all hotbeds of asylum for fugitives and anti-government groups. Wandering around the war zone that was Chicago, Larry got a perspective of what was going on. People were dying of scarvy in the streets, and the government and President Spade were collectively yawning and looking the other way. He saw posters of how to identify scarvy. To Larry the symptoms were vague; to him it seemed anyone could have scarvy.

Are you feeling tired and listless?

            You may have scarvy…

            If you develop the following symptoms:

1)     Fatigue, tiredness, boredom

2)     Weakness or pain in the joints

3)     Depression, lack of motivation or malaise

            Call the CDC immediately: 1-800-CDC-PAIN

            The way Larry saw it, all humans had those symptoms. Larry was beyond outraged; this was false at best and propaganda at worst.

            As he meandered through the fog, Larry saw bodies lying in the gutter. They weren’t even homeless, they were just lying there. On Main Street alone, there were 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Were they dead or just weak? Why wasn’t anyone helping them? Would they just be left to die?

            On the edge of the city, he came upon a co-op that grew and made most of its own food. They had a large organic garden in the back. The vegan burrito they served Larry changed his perspective on life and made him realize the government was lying to him. After inhaling it he felt extremely better. It was like energy for his body, and he vaguely remembered a time when food had made his body feel similar.

            “It’s always been the food,” Larry said to a white girl with nappy dreadlocks.

            She nodded, she already knew the nothing burger added nothing to the body as far as nutrition. It filled your stomach with waste which was a lot like fodder.

            Over the next few months, as Larry began to feel healthier and more virile, he began to get organized. He started a nutrition blog, and although few people used the INTER-NET for information, he received various emails about other functions from people who were feeling exactly like him. There were prayer circles and self-help groups; there were therapy groups and nothing burger addiction groups. Scott Walker, a young ruffian with purple hair, claimed the nothing burger was laced with drugs.

            “It’s got sedatives in it, so when you eat it you don’t want to move,” Walker explained.

            Larry began attending meetings a few times a week. Some of the meetings were informational, but some talked about revolution by violent means, advocating for guerrilla warfare against the government and the nothing burger it served.

            And so it came to pass that Larry was born during a very Orwellian time in United States history; a time when the population was so misinformed and the corporations so large, powerful and unfettered that the food being produced no longer held any nutritional value. The corporations had lobbyists which owned the government and the circle of misconception went around and around. Humans would eat full meals of fat and gluten and feel terrible and not realize their bodies were suffering from malnutrition. This was a state known as scarvy; of course most of the populous was oblivious to this. Larry thought it pertinent to share this information with everybody and anybody, but the funny part was most of the population didn’t believe him. People were dying of scarvy and nutritionists would tell them to keep eating nothing burgers and injecting themselves three times daily.

            He continued to attend meetings and was invited to go to a protest in Oakland in the country of California. Both Texas and California seceded from the Union in the 2030’s, California’s complaint that America was too bat-shit-crazy or as more polite people called it, conservative, and Texas’s complaint that the US was too damn liberal. Damn hippies. The damn hippies in California had banned the nothing burger saying it was a tool of fascism. Larry had heard of fascism but didn’t really understand it. To him, it seemed all governments were fascists. The protest was an attempt by California to alert the world and Americans of the dangers of the nothing burger. Larry spent the rest of his savings to take the Juggernaut to Oakland. The Juggernaut was a rocket ship that blasted off in Chicago and arrived in California in about 20 minutes.

            Larry found California baffling; the people dressed weird and acted even stranger. Their dialect didn’t even sound like English. Larry stayed with some friends he had met at the meetings. They ate spicy food and listened to bizarre music. Larry could not help but feel he did not fit in. The next day there was a meeting; they painted signs and practiced slogans. Larry didn’t know what to expect. The protest started out friendly, people marching around, raising their arms in unity, but around twilight a brigade of policemen in riot gear came out to meet the protestors and informed them that they must disperse. The protestors rebelled against the police, forming human chains and refusing to back down. As darkness began to descend, Larry saw the first cannons of tear gas being fired into the night and he immediately thought of a war zone.

            “I thought California banned the nothing burger,” Larry asked a young woman named Shannon with whom he had become acquainted.

            “They did but they didn’t; corporations still control too much of their government. We have to take the power back,” she shouted as the scene began to get smoky.

            Police in riot gear rushed in and clashed with the protestors and Larry thought this exactly like movies he had seen of war. When darkness fell, a policeman came and knocked Larry unconscious with a billy club. He awoke several hours later in a dark jail cell. He was kept in the dark jail cell for nearly a fortnight with no communication with anyone. Every day he was given a glass of water and a slice of bread. Eventually Larry was bailed out, but, upon trying to return to the United States, found he was no longer wanted. He had become a man without a country.

            Larry bummed around California. They didn’t seem to mind him being there; the climate was much more progressive, and he didn’t mind being there either. He was actually starting to like it. He met a bunch of interesting people and started to tell his story, the one you are reading. The INTER-NET was much more popular in California, and Larry’s blog really started to take off.

            “Scarvy is a disease just like scurvy. It is caused by a lack of nutrition,” Larry preached. He described in vivid detail how the nothing burger wasn’t made from beef, but something he called pink slime. He explained how the nothing burger was completely devoid of nutrition and was the cause of scarvy. His blog had over a million followers.

            With all of his free time, Larry decided to write a book, The Dangers of the Nothing Burger.

            People started to buy his book, and Larry suddenly became one of the affluent. Before he knew it he had a rather large bank account and, should he want it, the ability to buy his citizenship back into the United States. Yes, America was that hypocritical. He decided to stay in California.

            He booked an appointment with a nutritionist, one of the best in his field. The appointment cost 100 life credits and would’ve cost 100,000 dollars by 2020 standards.

            The nutritionist was named Dr. Gottlieb, and he was eccentric by almost any standard you go by.

            “Vas if I could give you a pill dat vould make da nothing burger obsolete?” Dr Gottlieb explained.

            “It ist possible,” he said with a smile.

            “Vould dat be something you’d be into?” he asked.

            Larry shrugged; he was paying a lot of currency for this.

            “It ist possible,” he explained, “wit da jelly fruit seed.”

            He pulled out a little seed that looked like there was a tiny fire burning brightly in its epicenter.

            Larry stared in wonder. “What the hell is a jelly fruit?”

            “Wait, you want me to eat that?” Larry questioned the nutritionist.

            “Da jelly fruit is a by-product of nuclear energy,” Dr Gottlieb explained.

            “Something that’s a by-product of nuclear energy doesn’t sound like something we should be putting in our bodies,” Larry told the nutritionist honestly.

            “I thought so at virst too,” Dr Gottlieb said, “but vonce you take the seed, you vill no longer need to sleep or eat.”

            Larry agreed reluctantly until he was led to a room. In the center of the room was a chair with straps for one’s arms and legs.

            “You’re strapping me down in that chair?” Larry asked accusingly.

            “Please it ist fur your safety…trust me,” Dr Gottlieb said.

            Larry did not trust him, but he allowed himself to be strapped into the chair.

            “Any last requests?” Dr Gottlieb said with a smile on his face.

            “Seriously.” Larry struggled, but it was useless; he was locked into the chair. He was a prisoner.

            The nutritionist, who was wearing rubber gloves now, picked up the glowing seed and forced it into Larry’s mouth. Larry tried to spit it out, but Dr. Gottlieb held his cheeks and forced him to swallow it.

            Once Larry took the seed, he realized the chair didn’t matter, he didn’t even need his body anymore. He could move about the universe freely. He spoke with water, who told him that it was literally God. Water showed him how to sidestep time. He met a being who claimed to be the color gray. He said he was very busy on Earth.

            Eventually Larry came back to his body strapped in that chair but it was a really long time, something like 15 Earth years. The planet had changed, and not for the better. Larry watched in horror as a world war ensued from India and Pakistan and Palestine and Israel, and then civilization itself collapsed. There was little he could do except run and hide. There was a dark age across the land and mankind itself was truly lost. Then a truly extraordinary event happened; mankind stopped fighting when aliens named Syrians arrived and began harvesting the planet’s lead and gold.

            Several crudely thrown together armies tried to stop them but were obliterated by weapons far beyond Earth’s current technology. The civilized Earthlings watched on as their Syrian overlords pillaged the planet. To make matters worse, the Syrians were brutal, hostile and not above torturing a human or two to get their point across. The humans tried to communicate their discomfort; they brought several what they called leaders, what the Syrians called complainers, to try and argue what in the Syrians’ eyes was a weak point of view. Larry was sadly stupid enough to volunteer for this job. Some of the diplomats were tortured to death, some were sent to freeze out in space, none were eaten by the Syrians, which was a rumor most Earthlings were discussing.

            Larry sought diplomatic negotiations but failed when he was chained to something that looked like a radiator in the aliens’ ship. When the aliens had finished mining all Earth’s lead and gold, they abruptly left, seeming to have forgotten that Larry was in their ship chained to a radiator-looking thing. In terms of space travel it was a fairly quick trip to the Sirius Solar System. It was less than 9 light years away. When Larry got there he didn’t know what to expect, but he didn’t expect this: there was an area on one of the planets called Little Earth with more than one thousand human inhabitants. They had their own co-op and garden and restaurants, a library, a movie theater and a bar. Larry settled in and found he actually thought he fit in here better than on Earth.  Even as he found a mate Larry knew his happiness would not last, because of his experimentation with the jelly fruit on Earth. He was cautiously aware that while everyone else was aging he seemed frozen in time, somewhere around the age of 33.

            He watched as everyone he knew and loved aged and died. Within a century, Larry wanted to leave and go back to Earth, but the Syrians refused. In fact, they refused to even acknowledge that he had made the request. Eventually he was able to speak with a lowly Syrian who could do little to help him. In broken English, the Syrian explained, “Yooh mistake ta tink we kea about ya plight.” Kea meaning care. The Syrian spit when he talked, “Space travel expensive, who gonna pay fur yooh?” After another century, Larry eventually agreed to a payment plan and within another century, Larry would be back on Earth. The Syrian government rarely went directly to Earth, so Larry would be taken aboard a trading vessel, which he was told would be in Earth’s general vicinity. Larry agreed and spent the next hundred years working like a dog on the dogstar.

            When at long last the time had come for Larry to ship off, it was less than funny that he had no one to say goodbye to. His wife had been dead for over two hundred years. Larry boarded the Carthaginian, for that was the name of the ship, and headed toward the stars, unbeknownst to him they were going in the opposite direction of Earth.

            After another century Larry began to inquire, “When do we get to Earth?”

            “It can’t be that far. On the trip from Earth to the Sirius Solar System with the Syrians, we arrived in less than…well it seemed like a few days….but it’s tough to tell in space,” he suggested.

            Little did Larry know they had no intention of taking him to Earth. Centuries later, after frantically searching for another jelly fruit seed, Larry would die in a spaceport, cold and lonely with his only copy of The Dangers of the Nothing Burger propping up his head as a pillow.