|
| |
|
|
Let
Them Eat Salsa
by Mad Dog
|
| And
why stop there? Let’s call Chee-tos dairy, potato chips a vegetable, pretzels a
grain, and fruit roll-ups a fruit serving. |
|
The United States
government has just made it easier for us to eat a balanced diet. How did they do this?
Not by requiring brewers to add 14 essential vitamins and minerals to beer. And not by
passing a law that says no one can get up from the table unless they finish all their
Brussels sprouts. No, they simply declared that from now on, salsa is a vegetable. By promoting salsa from a lowly condiment to its new
position, the Agriculture Department’s Food and Nutrition Service (motto: "Eat
all you want, we’ll grow more") made it so the nation’s schools can now buy
salsa and be reimbursed for it. Before this they were free to serve it but had to either
make it themselves or pay for it out of their own pocket, and we all know everything
tastes better when it’s free.
How they did this was simple: they
reclassified salsa as a vegetable salad. Right. And Godzilla’s the new Gone With The
Wind. If this is the beginning of a trend and they expand this Kondiments for Kids program
it won’t be long until the youth of America will be lunching on a healthy, hearty,
and filling all-vegetarian meal consisting of salsa, mustard, pickles, and soy sauce. And
why stop there? Let’s call Chee-tos dairy, potato chips a vegetable, pretzels a
grain, and fruit roll-ups a fruit serving.
The ketchup industry must be fuming. It
wasn’t bad enough that they lost first place in the condiment race a couple of years
back, with people buying salsa to the tune of $700 million a year, but now salsa has
succeeded where they couldn’t.
You might remember when the Reagan
administration tried to turn ketchup into a vegetable. Even with all of Heinz’s 57
varieties of lobbyist behind them they couldn’t muster the backing they needed. It
might be political. It could be sociological. Chances are it’s just the difference
between Reagan and Clinton. Well, other than the fact that Clinton doesn’t need
Viagra.
|
"I don’t like
ketchup," he said. "None of us likes ketchup. But the ketchup was very
cheap."
If there’s one thing you learn after three years in a 40-foot
boat it’s how to be a smart shopper. |
|
It’s a good
thing they didn’t succeed. I can envision children everywhere eyeing that big plop of
ketchup alongside their Fish Stick Hash. Then they’d eat it and be so full they
wouldn’t be able to touch the Lime Jell-O with Crunchy Gym Sweepings they got for
dessert. Now they’ll get salsa
instead, which is supposed to be a major improvement. But is salsa really better for you
than ketchup? Or is it just trendy right now? Personally I think its popularity stems from
the fact that there’s only one way to spell salsa and that makes everyone feel better
about themselves when they write a shopping list, and we all know we need our Minimum
Daily Requirement of Self-Esteem as set by the President’s Council on Misty Crystal
Empowerment and Feeling Good About Ourselves.
Russians apparently don’t have this
problem. Well, they may have the self-esteem problem but not the ketchup one. That’s
because they don’t like the stuff. Recently, when three Russian sailors stopped in
San Francisco on the final leg of a three-year trip they bought a six-pack of ketchup to
take with them. According to the captain they did it for all the right American reasons.
"I don’t like ketchup," he
said, in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle. "None of us likes ketchup. But
the ketchup was very cheap."
If there’s one thing you learn after
three years in a 40-foot boat it’s how to be a smart shopper. They say they’ll
probably throw the ketchup overboard on the way to Hawaii, along with a four-pound jar of
gourmet jelly beans. That’s a double slap in the face for Ronald Reagan. Someone
needs to tell these guys the Cold War is over.
|
A couple of years ago the E.U. decided that, for the sake of trade, carrots are a fruit,
escargot is a fish, and quail are no longer poultry. |
|
I think the real
reason behind this salsa reclassification is that the United States is jealous of the
European Union. They’re busy signing up new members, preparing to issue new money,
and creating new food rules. We, on the other hand, have no new members, our new paper
money looks like it came from a Monopoly set, and the best we can do is imitate them by
making up our own food rules. A
couple of years ago—and I swear I’m not making this up—the E.U. decided
that, for the sake of trade, carrots are a fruit, escargot (which the French consider to
be not only snails but edible) is a fish, quail are no longer poultry, curved cucumbers
and bent bananas are illegal, and restaurants serving cheese and celery sandwiches must
have separate boards to carve the cheese and celery.
This is serious stuff. Here in the United
States these laws would be considered unnecessary and downright frivolous, especially the
one about cheese and celery sandwiches. That's not because we think it's okay to cut those
blasphemous ingredients on the same board, but rather that no one in this country could
walk into any self-respecting restaurant and order a cheese and celery sandwich without
having the waitress say, "Hey Bud, where do you think you are? The European
Union?"
But now we’ve taken the international
lead again, returning ourselves to World Power status by being the first country to make
salsa a legally reimbursable vegetable. That’s something you couldn’t buy with
all the Eurodollars in the world.
©1998 Mad Dog Productions, Inc. All
Rights Reserved.
These columns appear in better newspapers across the country. They
taste great with salsa.
|
|
|
