Slim Jims - Good Clean Eating
by Mad Dog

    Slim Jims, for those of you who have never looked down while standing at the convenience store counter, are those round, orangey, dried meat sticks that look like, well, you know what they look like. They have a shelf life of almost a year, and a half life that makes plutonium look like a flash bulb. They’re most commonly eaten as a sneak—I mean snack, usually as a counterpoint to a breakfast of toasted rice cakes with “I Can’t Believe They Have The Nerve To Pretend It’s Butter” and a lunch of tofu filets on gluten-free lettuce. While they do contain trace nutrients, one of the larger Slim Jims can supply up to 20 percent of your recommended daily fat intake. Think of it as the anti-health.

    Slim Jims are very popular. In fact, in some parts of the country they’re considered to be a food group. Of course those are the same people who consider Chee-tos to be dairy, potato chips to be a vegetable, and Wonder Bread to be bread. The manufacturer, GoodMark Foods, Inc. (motto: “You can fool some of the people some of the time, and they’re our target market”), sells about $90 million worth of Slim Jims a year, which is amazing since no one will admit to eating them. To put that in perspective, if you laid an entire year’s output end-to-end starting at the Empire State Building, no self-respecting dog would consider touching them.

    Since he considered them to be an elegant snack—remember, this is about the same time pigs in a blanket were considered high class hors d’oeuvres—he knew he needed a classy emblem to match. Thus he came up with the image of a man in a tuxedo, top hat, and cane, which amazingly is the way most people who buy Slim Jims dress. Right, and I just got an invitation to Yassar Arafat’s grandson’s bar mitzvah.

    Needing a name, Levis called the tuxedoed guy Spam. I mean, Slim Jim. At least he was smart enough to realize that with World War II still fresh in people’s minds, a shriveled up piece of dried meat called Adolph’s probably wasn’t a wise idea.

    Over the years they’ve expanded the line to include mild, Tabasco, nacho, beef ‘n cheese, and Last Week’s Tuna Casserole flavors. They come as small as a 4-inch snack and as large as a foot-and-a-quarter-incher, perfect for those with more money than respect for their arteries. And now they’ve gone international—you can get them in Japan and England. While I can see sending them to Japan—after all, we still owe them for Karaoke, Pokémon, and Pacman—I’m not sure what England did to deserve this, especially considering they already eat overcooked, dried, shriveled meat for dinner. Though you have to admit, Slim Jims do have portability on their side.

    Seeing how popular self-cleaning ovens, self-cleaning irons, and, well, self-cleaning selves were, scientists at Pilkington PLC figured out a way to chemically treat window glass so sunlight breaks down the dirt and causes water to sheet off the surface, washing the dirt away. This will be great for skyscrapers, houses with sealed windows, and anyplace where people are too busy eating Slim Jims to be bothered keeping the house clean.

    Pilkington Activ, as it’s called, could revolutionize the world. There could be self-cleaning reading glasses, auto windshields, and drinking glasses. Guys could wear T-shirts treated with Activ-I-Tee for days—just like they do now—except they’d stay clean the whole time.

    Imagine being able to pour a capful of Activ-Bubbles in the kids’ bath water on Saturday night and knowing that when they’re diving head first into mud puddles for the next six days the dirt will slide off them like, well, water off a Pilkington Activ window. As long as it’s sunny, that is. On rainy days you may have to make them stand in the back hall under a sun lamp like a scene from “Outbreak”, except of course you won’t have to worry about blood pouring out of their eyes if it doesn’t work.

    If it can be packaged in aerosol spray cans you could walk downtown and, the next time you’re asked for spare change, whip out the Activ-Eez and—voila!—help clean up your city. But best of all, they could coat Slim Jims with Activ. That way you’d be able to clean out your insides while you ate something that, until now, was considered bad for you. Face it, anything that can turn Slim Jims into a health food has got to be a good invention.

©2001 Mad Dog Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
These columns appear in better newspapers across the country. Read them while sneaking that third Slim Jim of the day.