The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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The other day I bought a bag of Frito-Lay potato chips and as is my wont from my early reading days as an 8 year old studying cereal boxes, I read the packaging. These potatoes, I was informed in a tidy paragraph written by public relations specialists who had no doubt conducted extensive customer surveys, were FARM-RAISED. Imagine! I’m guessing grown right in the ground. Tractors, fields, insecticides, migrant labor: farm raised. BOLD TYPE. Major advertising feature. The oils used were ‘natural’ too and this was worth trumpeting.

Holy cow manure, Batman, what’s the NEXT big thing in the food biz? Cheetos raised hydroponically? Personally I’m not sure consumers are really ready for food grown in the wild. Bugs, fungus, bacteria, all that creepy stuff a farmer is ill-equipped to handle outside a laboratory or a petri dish. We can grow meat without legs now, protein on a rope, and rumor has it the burger chains are nearing a breakthrough on cloning buns, with or without sesame seeds, directly on to the meat patty grown in secret underground hermetically sealed bunkers of Monsanto and Dow Chemical. You think they’re going to stick a filthy leaf of lettuce or a listeria riddled tomato on their antiseptically pure chemoWhopper? Get real. Not….

This whole Slow Food movement just flies in the face of 21st century culinary logic. We invented TV dinners so we’d have the time to watch more TV instead of wasting countless hours messing with the cooking of raw potentially contaminated food. These purveyors of old school eating call themselves environmentalists, but what about the damage from a bazillion cookbooks printed on paper from slaughtered trees? Next thing you know, they’ll advocate recipes for bark. A backlash is coming, count on that, the next step beyond vegetarianism. Stop eating plants. Stop the killing of carrots. It’s not only cruel, it’s filthy with germs and dirt. So Frito-Lay, nice try. But I’m afraid the world isn’t ready — we’ve turned the corner on 19th century farm products. Work on synthetic broccoli that tastes like Snickers if you want to stay profitable. Hook the kids and you own the future. Next time you need marketing advice, call me first. Save yourself some embarrassment.

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