Saturday, April 18, 2009

Stomach still not happy with Happy Meal

I was going to write about Ulster County's new law requiring chain restaurant to post calorie counts in their menus.

Thing is, I already have, when New York City passed a similar law last year.

So I might as well post the whole thing here:

Stomach not happy with Happy Meal
In its never-ending war against the people's right to be fat, the city of New York began requiring that chain restaurants put calorie counts on their menus.

This violation of our God-given right to misuse "God-given" in phrases comes after the city passed a ban on transfats, the artificial goodies that like to party heartily in your coronary artery.

Thankfully for big people outside of the Big Apple, Big Macs are not a big deal.

That's because fast food is healthy, according to the impartial Web sites of the fast food chains.

For instance, McDonald's and Burger King stress that their burgers are made with 100 percent beef.

So you can sleep happy knowing that the burgers are entirely made of murdered cows that were pulverized into gooey stringy bits.

Also great is the fact that the buns that wrap the healthy beef patties are made with tasty and nutritious things like thiamine mononitrate, ribovflavin, niacin, sodium stearoyl lactylate, amonium sulphate and more than two dozen other unpronounceable ingredients.

That's what happens when a company is run by a clown or a guy in king's suit.

Not surprisingly, if you are a fast food consumer, chances are you are not that concerned about what's in the food because you are too busy being angry at the attendant who just messed up your order of two half-pound Angus burgers with three large fries and five sodas (Why do they always forget that you want diet soda?)

Besides, you most likely want a beef patty made out of an diabetic cow that died of a heart attack and was injected with high fructose corn syrup, steroids and cheese from a can.

But the fast food restaurants will have none of this. They really want you to know that their food is OK and that their flavors are naturally made with an ingredient called "Natural Flavors."

The solution to this problem of not knowing what's your beef is nutrition education, according to experts, otherwise known as unemployed nutrition educators.

The chains' efforts are impressive. For instance, McDonald's has answers to all your questions, like:

* "Are there worms in the meat?"; and

* "Are there really eyeballs and other weird stuff in your burgers?!?"



All this makes one wonder:

* Do McDonald's question writers know how to use exclamation marks?!?

* "Are there really people asking if there really are eyeballs in the burgers?"

* "Aren't eyeballs more expensive than meat, anyway?"

* "Is that burger looking at me?"

* But seriously, "Are there really eyeballs and other weird stuff in your burgers?"

Not to be outdone, Burger King also has answers to your important nutritional questions such as, "Quick! What was the Burger King slogan in 1974?"

Luckily, you will forget all this nonsense, because you just finished your burger and now you have to go to the bathroom really fast.