The Coonridge Digest – Death by fudge

Greetings from the Ridge.
Math and I have never been friends. I think it’s because when I was taking tests in school, numbers wouldn’t lend themselves to any “fudge factor.” The dog-goned answer had to be exactly right.
If the teacher asked me to explain the reasons for our entering World War II, I could mealy-mouth my way around a response that touched briefly on Adolf Hitler, Pearl Harbor, and the bombing of Britain. I never had to come down too hard on a definite conclusion. But when faced with what I thought was the rather remote possibility of needing the area of a triangle, I found that I couldn’t worm around the answer. The teacher seemed to think that there was only one correct response and it had nothing to do with Winston Churchill.
Okay, so my mind is not prone to interpreting numbers correctly, but I came across a set recently that I was able to figure out in a heartbeat. For ever dollar the USA spends on nutrition education, the food industry spend $24 on ads and marketing. I immediately jumped to a conclusion that would have made my sophomore math teacher jump with joy and caused her theorems to tingle. The food industry is spending more to get us to buy their food than the government spends to warn us about the dangers.
When you factor in one more salient bit of info, the problem becomes obvious: Each day 25% of us eat fast food and we list our favorite vegetables as potato chips and French fries. The sum total of this gastronomic equation is…  Death by Food.
It breaks down something like this: The Cooperative Extension System spends sixty million a year telling us what foods will kill us most quickly, the USDA spends 30 billion, state governments toss in an additional billion or two and all tolled, this amounts to… well, as I said, I don’t do numbers well. But it’s a lot.
And this is all to tell us that certain foods make us fat. They don’t kill us outright, but they sneak around in the various disguises of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, osteoarthritis, gout, gallbladder malfunction, and pure anxiety when you get the inside seat on overseas flights.
The main thrust of the USDA’s attack on our belt size seems to be the labeling of food products. I am old enough to remember the time when a jar of jelly simply said, “Jelly.” Today’s jam jar resembles a chemistry text, a class that I dreaded with equal ferocity as math.
And the effectiveness of labeling depends on three things: 1. Can we understand what the label means? 2. Can we read it? and 3. Do we give two hoots?
Your ability to answer number one depends on your advanced education degrees, and number three you can answer for yourself. As to number two, being able to simply read the information on the typical food product, well, there we’ve got a problem Houston.
I have good eyes. My eye doctor told me this. I go down to K-Wall once every two years, pick up a stronger degree of reading spectacles and I’m set until I flounce into the front seat of my Honda with glasses in pocket and end up with a pocketful of crushed glass. Bottom line: I can see and I can read. So how come I must put three pair of these reading glasses, one on top of the other, atop the label of most canned goods to be able to read what’s written there? Is this a conspiracy to keep me from reading the death notice on my tapioca or has the USDA simply required so much information that it can’t possible be listed on a single can?
Let me propose a saner and much simpler method of labeling foods.
It’s called the TQ – Taste Quotient. It’s uncomplicated and trouble-free: the better a food tastes, the greater the likelihood that it will kill you. Every food would be labeled with a simple KF – Kill Factor. Say perhaps on a scale of 1-10, it’ll state the likelihood that a steady diet of this food will have your family picking out caskets in the near future.
Or you could skip the label altogether and simply put a little scratch and taste tab on each package. Put a dab of the product on your tongue and if you figure it’s something you’d like to take home and enjoy then that’s a sign you should increase your life insurance coverage. If it tastes like wet cardboard you can go ahead and plan next year’s cruise to Nassau.
If all this seems ridiculous and you prefer wading through the long list of minuscule amounts and percentages then this probably means you can find the area of a triangle and I have no use for you anyway.
You ever in Coonridge, stop by. We may not answer the door, but you’ll enjoy the trip.