Tuesday, April 13, 2010

We care a lot.

I once met a guy who talks just like Mark Morford writes. Of course, it was three in the morning at a club and I'm reasonably certain the dude was coked to the gills; I don't know what Mark's excuse is.

Anyhow, now he has his pixie dust all worked into a lather about KFC's new Triple Bypass Sandwich, or whatever they call it. He's pretty sure it's not healthy. I'm pretty sure it's not either, which is why I don't intend to live on a steady diet of the things. However I can just about guarantee that you could eat one for lunch a couple times a week with no ill effects, so long as the rest of your diet was reasonably balanced and you engaged in exercise a little more vigorous than, say, playing World of Halo Vice City. It's just greasy chicken, some bacon, and that stuff they call "special sauce" in fast food joints; it's not like it's an Arsenic, Lettuce, and Tomato on toasted Brillo pads.

Avoiding the McGreasewich isn't good enough for Mark, though. Like a left wing version of those guys who worry on the shortwave about the Freemason cattle mutilators hiding out at Area 51, he's sure it's part of a plot by Big Fast Food to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids, make our kids fat, and kill us all. Because that's how those corporate fat cats make their money, see; by killing customers. Every time a customer dies... well, something Underpants Gnome-like happens, but whatever it is, it makes fat cats get richer. (It will probably not come as a surprise to you that Mr. Morford went to U.C. Berkeley; I am guessing he wasn't an econ major, but with Berkeley, you can never tell.)
Maybe it's all a silly, futile argument, a fool's game to point up the obvious evil of such products. These items are legion. They just keep right on coming. What's more, it's just capitalism at work. It's about giving the people what they want, right?

And if they don't really want it -- if, deep down, most humans sense this garbage is hugely unhealthy, that it's a form of slow poison and there are far better and wiser options out there -- well, you do what companies like KFC, Coca-Cola, Kraft, McDonald's and all the rest have done since the dawn of the free market.

You convince the less educated and the gullible that they are wrong, that this crap is actually a good value for your family, nutritious and safe to feed to children, even as you manufacture all the flavors, smells and meat-like textures in a giant lab and sell truckloads of the crap to the poorer classes, until they get fat and sick and die.

See? He cares. He cares about what these... these... capitalists ptui! are doing to the poorer, and I quote, "classes".

Because he cares about this, it makes him better than you. A more elevated being, if you will. Also smarter. Why, if he was any smarter and more caring, he'd have to go into politics. You know, like Al or Barry.

29 comments:

og said...

He writes this while, by his own admission, sipping scotch.

Oh, I see, it's what I like that's bad, what he likes is good.

Tam said...

I know. He has a pretty elastic definition of "healthy".

Ken said...

...and then KFC gets Congress to pass a Triple Bypass individual mandate that forces you to buy them, or forfeit your income tax refund, or pay a fine of $750 (which in 2014 might buy one o'those).

You can game the system, though. When you get hungry, you can buy one.

Justin Buist said...

I forget the calorie numbers on that double chicken bacon deal but I recall it being in the 500ish range. Not really all that bad for a fast food sammich. Wash it down with some unsweetened ice tea and add some greens and you're not doing too bad.

Sure it's high in fat but your body has a manner of dealing with too much of that at one time. Hint: It floats.

The super white bread buns that you get with most fast food is probably going to transfer more calories to your body than that chicken will. Stuff breaks down easy, might as well be eating mashed potatoes. It's just slightly more complex than purified sugar.

At least the chicken will give you more protein and amino acids that you could possibly use. And the body knows what to do with the extra of that stuff too. Hint: They sink.

In some ways I'm glad we're constantly being reminded by people smarter than us what to eat. A rather sane and healthy conscious contact of mine alerted me to the fact that Crisco was originally not intended to be a food as part of this whole "trans fat = bad" movement. I looked into it and sure enough, hydrogenated oils were intended to be a replacement for candle wax. Then Edison made the light bulb and that whole business model went away. So they turned it into a cooking product.

I switched to using lard and butter. And now my scrambled eggs are freaking awesome.

I'll end the comment now. My left arm is feeling a bit numb.

phlegmfatale said...

It's a dirty job but someone's gotta do it.

Thanks for the Faith No More reference. :)

B said...

They aren't that good, really.

and the service at KFC still sux.

http://middleoftheright.blogspot.com/2010/04/it-was-not-teh-awesome.html

Keads said...

Sorry Tam, just more of the same. Tobacco companies can't call cigarettes "Light" anymore. Might mislead the unwashed masses in to thinking they are safer than the Camel unfiltered. It only took a 2006 opinion that logged 1,653 pages from U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler to fix this by ordering a variety of marketing, sales and advertising restrictions on the tobacco industry, including an order that barred cigarette makers from promoting brands as "light" or "low tar."

Uh Duh! They do say on the side of every pack that this is not the equivalent of doing the gov food pyramid every day!

Oh, my advice: Just get the packs that have warnings that say "may cause low birth weight" instead of the ones that say "lung cancer and emphysema" under this logic!

Keads said...

Oh yeah, "shortwave"? Please provide the frequency as Neal Boortz comes in on the medium wave receiver down here, LOL!

Man I do miss the BBC world service though!

Jake (formerly Riposte3) said...

"I forget the calorie numbers on that double chicken bacon deal but I recall it being in the 500ish range. Not really all that bad for a fast food sammich."

I remember seeing somewhere that it's about the same calories and fat that's in a Big Mac - which none of the people screaming "OMG it's EVIL food!!!11100010111!!!" seem to be having an apoplectic fit about. And, as Justin pointed out, the bun on the Big Mac will stay with you longer than the "evil" of the Double Down.

I might have to try one just out of spite.

Anonymous said...

If that guy sneered any harder in his writing, he'd run the risk of poking himself in the brain the next time he brushes his teeth.

What an asshole.

Jim

Cond0011 said...

Makes me want to go on an eat-all-day Mcdonalds weight reduction program (KFC is located too far away).

True, I may not be the most healthy considering the fact that soybeans are not the most healthy things to eat (Note: At one time - years before the Soybean Lobbyists did their Orwellian Magic in Washington - Farmers wouldn't even feed the stuff to their pigs...), weight loss/gain really is a numbers game.

But then, liberals were never big on math...

Frank W. James said...

Cond0010: Soybeans still have to be 'cooked' to be fed to swine, otherwise you will poison them and they will die.

However if you 'drive' the soybeans through an Archimedes screw-horn, you create soybean-meal that sprays out the little nozzle in the end and the process heats it through resistance to a level where it's digestible for hogs. The bean meal is actually 'cooked'. They thrive off the stuff because it's so high in digestible protein.

Still, it's soybean meal and tastes like crap to us, but then hogs aren't real picky about taste when it comes to food.

All The Best,
Frank W. James

Cond0011 said...

Thanks for the update, Frank.

My info is more than 50 years old and comes from my Stepdad who grew up on a Farm in Herman, Minnesota.

He still will not touch anything with soy in it - nor will he eat cheese (another story...)

I put that little tid-bit in as a swipe at hippies and their love of soybeans over meat. :)

Brad K. said...

Offer to let SEIU collect union dues from workers at KFC, and I bet the story turns around.

But - why not have just the simple, plain, unsugared sauerkraut to go with it?

Or maybe McDonalds could offer some beer-braised brats 'n kraut. With hops-flavored milkshakes.

alath said...

Alcohol causes cirrhosis, traffic fatalities, and behavioral problems. Writing sanctimonious screeds about the evils of corporations and the incompetence of the general public to manage their own lives causes high blood pressure, peripheral vasculopathy, and cerebrovascular accidents.

The governemnt needs to shut this guy down, for his own health and safety. He's obviously not educated or emotionally stable enough to make his own decisions.

Noah D said...

the obvious evil of such products

You know old Adolf has to be raging, wherever he is. Why go to the trouble of fighting a Europe-wide war and gassing zillions of 'undesireables', when he could have just made a chicken/bacon sandwich?

Had I talent and time, this would be a perfect subject for one more of those 'Downfall' clips.

OA said...

Simple solution...call him a racist. Apparently any time anyone brings up fried chicken it's a dig against blacks (because no one else eats fried chicken).



Word Verification: terdsan
I shit you not.

Joanna said...

You can have my fried chicken when you tug it gently from my grease-covered fingers

'cause darn it all if I can't get a grip on anything for two hours after eating it.

Totally worth it, though.

TW said...

As long as they don't go after chili-cheese flavored corn dogs, everything will be OK.

Anonymous said...

too many people
solution: thermonuclearwar

alternate solution:
fast food and tobacco

I asked my Doctor why they don't ban cigarettes; she said "we want you old people to die off earlt to make room for the baby boomers on social security and medicare"

OK I'll do my part

Sarah said...

Would the power-hungry, self-righteous, smug jackasses of this country please stop trying to speak for me? I'm one a-them poor kids from the South, so yeah, this asswipe is trying to tell me that I'm too ignorant to know that shoveling fast food into my pie hole too often or in too-large amounts will do bad things to my body.

If I want to drop a few bucks on fast food every week, let me. If I don't control myself, I die sooner and nobody has to worry about my merry ass taking up precious space in the drive-thru lanes of America anymore. And I no longer have to listen to putrid, drunken spewing from smug-infected idiots like this guy. Win win all around, I'd say.

W/V: "Uncalmu." No. Really.

Crotalus (Don't Tread on Me) said...

Well, what did you expect from the Huffington Pest, er...*ahem* "Post"?

LeeAnn said...

I loathe the Food Nazis like Morford. Hate with a teeth-grinding intensity that is surely worse for my health than an once-in-a-while foody treat.

Sigivald said...

Funny how people like that think that The Evil Corporations can make The Rubes swallow anything, even things they don't like.

Did they never hear about New Coke?

Crystal Pepsi?

Somehow giant Evil Corporations spent millions, billions of dollars trying to get people to buy these things... and failed miserably.

It's almost like the Rubes know what they want, and what they don't.

Fits said...

Well that settles it fer me.

McDonalds hereabouts was tootin' their tax day special of buy one Big Mac then get another for a penny, whilst the Kentucky Fried Chicken folks over the hill were goin blind trying to do 'em one better.

Now I know which franchise owner will spend the day watchin his profits go towards enlarging my fat ass.

Oh yeah, and you can keep the new grilled junk. Fried and dripping is the way the Good Lord meant his chickens to be et.

John A said...

That type of article always assumes that the item[s] in question is the totality of the diet of us "poor" and "ignorant" and "gullible" types who do not have the benefit of the author`s vastly superior knowledge and experience and, yes, money.

I wonder what this guy thinks happens if you eat nothing but greens? Even full-on vegetarians know - you die. But does he rant against salad bars? Nah... I doubt he even thinks about his tipple being a byproduct of rotting vegetation, i.e. the excretions of very small animals who have eaten said vegetation, and a known poison.

Michael said...

"Why, if he was any smarter and more caring, he'd have to go into politics. You know, like Al or Barry."

FTW! That deserves a shot in the open guitar case. . .

Tam said...

Phlegmmie,

"Thanks for the Faith No More reference. :)"

It makes me so happy that people notice these things. :)

Gewehr98 said...

I'll take my chances with coronary blockage ala' FC vs. his cirrhosis via booze any day.

What a tool...

WV - "fixicarc" What a KFC Double Down would probably do to you if you ate them 3 times a day/7 days a week, but that's still my choice, Mr. Morford.