The Environmental Inspector
by Baxter Black, DVM
At the convenience store I poured a 12 ounce styrofoam cup half full of coffee. Then I put it under the cappuccino chemical flavor dispenser and dribbled in French magnesium vanilla, hot cobalt chocolate and hazelnut ammonium hydroxide. Then I took two each of the pasteurized artificially flavored synthetic Irish creme, amaretto chloride and mentholated mint in their peel, spill and drip sealed thimble cups and tried to splash their contents in the ever filling 12 ounce cup.
All the while I was preparing my cauldron concoction, my taste buds were leaping in a bud frenzy, doing gumdrop cartwheels and encouraging my salivary glands to wet their pants.
Toxic coffee. An exquisite potion. With my admitted weakness for such an unnatural beverage, you would think that I would have some understanding of my children's love for Pop Tarts, with their filling like gritty tar on hot pavement and a hard dough reminiscent of unleavened bread. Usually eaten unheated, it is a cardboard and jelly sandwich.
Or how about dried cereal bits formed into the shape of clover leaves, letters, hatchets, pinto beans, bat eyes or squirrel testicles, dyed algae green or hemoglobin orange and rolled in powdered cinnamon, baby talc or graphite.
Food preservatives have been essential to man's civilization. Salted, vinegared, dried, smoked, frozen or lyed it has allowed us to live between hunts and harvests. But when I see packaged pastry pizza or trail mix with the shelf life of a petrified wood, I get queasy.
Not to mention genetic manipulation which has given us tennis ball tomatoes that would not break on the bat of Sammy Sosa, bright red and taste more like carpet fiber than tomatoes.
Mexican mutant strawberries as flavorless as poi. It's what we've done to chicken, so we can roll it in carbo dust, deep fry it and addict our kids, but I digress...
The ultimate toxic invention...a fruit roll-up. A flattened sticky hanky size sheet of goo. It reminds me of a frog's tongue on the roof of an octopus mouth. But kids love it! So be it.
Right now I'm sipping coffee made from fresh ground Costa Rican beans in a china cup with real cream...and I'm wishing it had a big squirt of pecan caramel caustic cappuccino with pH of 2. Probably not a good idea though, might take the enamel right off the cup.
Previous
Issue:
November 2001
Opening
Ceremony at the 2001 Wishing Star Gallop
Playgirl's
Conculsion Tops Wishing Star
Gallop's Sale
Baxter
Black -
The Environmental Inspector
Weaver Quarter Horse Annual Production Sale Results
Vet
Corner -
Post Mating
Uterine Infection
in the Mare
REAL ESTATE SECTION
- Rehabilitation
of Old Barns
