Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger

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Food is killing us, it’s gotta go

The sooner we get around to banning food, the safer we all will be. It's stupid to take all the intermediate steps of banning certain ingredients in food and banning TV commercials that make eating certain foods look like fun when it's clear that food itself is fatal.

New York City is getting ready to ban all restaurants and eateries from using "artificial trans fats" and "partially hydrogenated oils." Artificial trans fats and partially hydrogenated oils are long-hair scientific terms that simply refer to the stuff they put in food to make it taste yummy. It's what makes fake butter spreadable, for instance.

Theoretically, putting fake fat in a butterlike product was supposed to be healthier than real butter containing real fatty fat. It turns out that the fake fat is just as bad for your arteries as the real fat, but without the nutrition that comes with eating real food.

But real food kills you, too. So if New York City is successful at ridding the city of artificial fat, people will just go back to eating real fat and die anyway. It's food that is the real culprit, which is why we need to cut to the chase and just ban it.

The Federal Communications Commission (three fellas who have absolutely no sense of humor) want to ban TV commercials using cartoon characters like SpongeBob Square Pants and Scooby-Doo to push salty, sugary, fatty (i.e., great-tasting) food to kids. Kids are not old enough to know that Tony the Tiger and Cap'n Crunch are hit men for the evil food industry.

The food industry is out to kill kids, and kids are just too young to know it. If they were older, like 43, they'd know better. But then they wouldn't be eating Lucky Charms ("They're magically homocidal-icious!"); they'd be eating a pizza on which anchovies are optional but artificial trans fats are mandatory. So there you go.

LAWYERS ARE trying to shut down fast-food restaurants because everybody knows people only go there to kill themselves. McDonald's french fries are like little laser-guided cruise missiles aimed directly at your heart. And don't even talk about Big Macs. My god, those are like IEEDS (Improvised Explosive Eating Devices ) or Weapons of Obese Destruction designed with only one thing in mind: mass casualties. You ever wonder why Jack in the Box's clown's head is so big? It's filled with diabolical ways of killing us with food.

But the most dangerous places of all, the Axis of Evil Food Proliferation, are Iran and North Korea. Just kidding. It's actually Safeway, Times and Foodland. Have you been in one of these hellholes? They are FILLED with food, most of it the kind that will kill you. There are entire rows of freezers packed with ice cream, a veritable stockpile of fats, fake fats, partially hydrogenated oils, completely hydrogenated oils, supremely hydrogenated oils and, the Darth Vader of all fatal food additives, plain old oil. Not Alaska oil pipeline oil (that tastes too funky), but oil that comes from things like peanuts, bacon and, I believe, garbanzo beans.

Supermarkets are vast killing fields of food: red meat, white meat, the "other" white meat, potato chips, mayonnaise, frozen french fries of death, sour cream, buttermilk, eggs, white bread, the "other" white bread, hot dogs ... I can't go on. I'm feeling faint. I saw a man at Safeway carry an entire pot roast out of the store, and NO ONE TRIED TO STOP HIM.

I personally have bought a box of frozen White Castle hamburgers in the supermarket knowing that there should be a three-day waiting period for such a dangerous purchase.

It has to stop. Suing fast-food chains, banning TV commercials and stopping restaurants from selling delicious tasting entrees is not going to work. We can't trust parents to feed their children the allegedly "good" food. We can't trust adults to feed themselves "good" food. I mean, lethal pizzas can actually be delivered to your door! How crazy is that?

No, we need the government to protect our children, to protect us from ourselves. We need government to ban all food in whatever guise it comes. Sure, we'll eventually die of starvation. But at least we'll die healthy.