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Last week, the Food and Drug Administration decreed that olestra is suitable for public consumption. According to the publicity, olestra cooks and tastes like real fat, but you don't digest it; it merely passes through your system.
Olestra thus allows you to gorge on potato chips or doughnuts to your heart's content, without adding poundage that might strain your heart.
Some charge that the stuff could be dangerous. Certain vitamins attach to fat molecules during digestion so that they can move through your system and build strong bodies.
These vitamins are too stupid to know the difference between a real fat like rendered lard and a fake fat like olestra. They could attach to the olestra and pass on through; malnutrition might result.
Olestra struck me as yet another example of American decadence. Millions of people have trouble getting enough to eat, and we find ways to remove energy from food.
It brought to mind lurid scenes from tenth-grade world history, wherein plutocrats of the Roman Empire attended huge feasts and tottered off to the vomitorium so that they could continue the pleasures of over-eating.
It also inspired a recollection from 18 years ago at the weekly newspaper in Breckenridge.
Every Tuesday afternoon, a mysterious young woman named Long Sam would appear and set type until the paper was done. Then she vanished until next week. She lived in a tepee outside town, and I once inquired about her lifestyle.
Sam had grown up in comfortable circumstances before
going abroad to live among real privation. Upon her return
to America, The first thing I saw was a billboard for
diet dog food. I've just been where babies starved, and I
come to this sick country where they worry about dogs
getting fat. I decided I would never do more than just get
by here, so that I wouldn't get trapped in that American
sickness.
So Sam lived in her tepee and worked one day a week. Wherever she is now, I doubt she's an olestra customer, although you can never be sure. Some devout non-materialists of my youth now boast fleets of Jeep Cherokees.
But olestra really isn't all that special. Fake fat is just a continuation of other trends.
Traditionally, if you wanted to savor the pleasures of beer, you also had to put up with the other effects: acting loud and stupid around other people, some of whom might be employers, bankers or other superintendents of your destiny; sleeping on the lawn because it was too hard to reach the front door; dry heaves on the morrow.
But the big brewers solved that. First they gave us
light
concoctions, so that you could be one of the
guys even as you held a wimpy brew. Then they started
selling alcohol-free
beer.
What's the point? If you need something cold and fizzy and alcohol-free, club soda costs a lot less. Perhaps the point is that you've got to have something that looks and smells like beer in order to maintain your social status, but who needs that kind of society?
A similar product is decaffeinated coffee, which
allegedly provides the flavors and aromas of coffee without
the buzz. But in case you haven't noticed, coffee
and caffeine
are pretty much the same word. Caffeine
is the essence of coffee. What's coffee without it?
We keep making virtual products which look like the real thing but aren't. The real Superbowl game today is likely to be a boring blow-out. But who needs real football when we've got the Bud Light vs. Bud Regular game? Who needs real journalism when we've got USA Today and Entertainment Tonight -- frothy stuff that resembles the real thing, but requires no thought?
For that matter, real democracy is a messy business, especially when the proletarian rabble get involved.
Once I was talking politics with a friend who edits a newspaper in a World-Class Destination Resort. The town board had just passed some quasi-socialist measure, which shocked me, because there were so many People of Money in World-Class, and I presumed they must dominate politics.
But most People of Money can't vote here,
my
friend explained. They keep their legal residence in
Texas or some other state without an income tax. The people
who actually live here, who can't afford any other legal
residence, are just working stiffs like me who tend to be
less conservative in their politics.
You can see how that could lead to problems, but fortunately, the Democracy Lite solution is emerging near Telluride at the new municipality of Mountain Village. Its charter permits non-resident property owners to vote by mail. But resident non-property owners must live in town at least 180 days to vote, thereby insuring that few of the working class, mostly seasonal employees, will have any say in how the Mountain Village enclave operates.
There will be elections, of course, along with the other outward trappings of democracy, just as olestra provides the taste of rich food without adding to the waistline.
You name it, from fat to democracy, and we can fake it. Makes you proud of American creativity, doesn't it?
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