HOLY COW! What’s happening to our food?? Apart from
rising prices, that is? Some recently tabled items in the news
certainly don’t seem kosher! Picture this.

For example (camera one on,
with a little intro music, Maestro,
if you please), have you noticed
that ‘‘let’s do lunch”’ has taken on
a newer and darker meaning?

I’m sure most of you by now
have seen the telephone commer-
cial on the telly where the tummy-
empty croc slips off the muddy
river bank and into the murky
water to move towards the screen
(insert theme from Jaws). That
poor, nameless wretch behind the
camera must look to the hungry
gator like a platter of sizzling,
steaming ribs, with a side dish of
butter-dripping corn.

Look out! It’s the attack of the
“killer tomatoes!!’’ (Move to
camera two.) Coming soon, toa
schoolyard or backyard garden
near YOU!

I refer of course to the saga of
the “‘killer tomato seeds”’ that
resulted last month from the scare
stories that said 120,000 tomato
seed kits from space, sent to school
children in Canada and the United
States, could possibly produce
poisonous and mutated fruit.

It seems the seeds had been left
over in the back of the fridge in
space for nearly six years, five
years longer than planned, and
thus long exposed to such en-
vironmental dangers as cosmic
radiation, extreme temperatures,
and weightlessness, to say nothing
of fridge fungus, as one of 57 (a la
Heinz?) experiments in a 12-sided,
bus-sized National Aeronautics
and Space Administration labora-
tory satellite.

The tomato seeds were retrieved
in January by astronauts aboard
the earth-orbiting space shuttle
Columbia, using the Canadian-
developed robot arm, and brought

back to earth.

Here, at ground zero, they were
counted down and put into neat
litthe NASA packages and parcell-
ed out to some 58,000 school
teachers as part of NASA’s ongo-
ing school programs.

The Los Angeles Times, with its
devilish and natural proximity to
Hollywood, let loose the ‘thing
from outer space’ terror on, ap-
propriately enough, April’s Friday
the 13th, when it quoted from an
Oklahoma State University memo:
“There is a remote possibility that
radiation-caused mutations could
cause the plants to produce toxic
fruit.” Ouch! {Insert the theme
from The Twilight Zone.) The
memo was written by one Nelson
Ehrlich of the university, which
oversees NASA’s school programs.

The situation wasn’t helped any
when Alvin Young, Director of the
U.S. Agriculture Department’s
Agriculture Biotechnology Office
(whew!) said at a NASA news con-
ference that he “‘thought”’ (?) the
space tomatoes were safe for
children to be around.

Thought?

Safe?

I guess Alvin hadn’t seen the
movie The Body Snatchers. Nor
were people’s fears eased by news
bites on T.V. showing panic-
stricken teachers and principals
carting away from classrooms the
crates of sprouting experimental
space tomato plants to the cooler
of a safer storage.

Pity the poor tomato. And just
after it had seemed to outlive all
that sour publicity and terror tales
of a century or two ago that it was
the devil’s fruit, certain to drive
eaters insane. Oh, well!

And if the killer tomato scare

wasn’t bad enough, then how
about those baked worms that
were fed to the kinderkids in an
Ottawa suburb (camera one on).
School lunch will forever have a
new meaning at the Ecole
Seraphin-Morinin Gloucester.

That story also hit the fan last
month when it was reported that
the local school board was con-
sidering action following com-
plaints to the health unit from
angry parents that their
kindergarten children were fed
baked worms as part of a school
experiment.

Some parents only learned of the
classroom cookout after their
five-year-olds came home waving
certificates congratulating them for
eating worms.

They weren’t at all appeased by
the fact that the fat and juicy
wrigglers were first boiled in lemon
water before being baked as noted
in a how-to book from the Ontario
Science Centre.

Does Barbara McCreadie have
this recipe? Does anyone care?
One can’t help but wonder what
the side dish was, but the parents
were no doubt too afraid to ask.

But wait! There’s more! (Cam-
era two on; move in for close-up.)
It seems a certain hallelujah
preacher man in Missouri thought
he’d ‘‘show’’ his poor parishioners
a thing or two about the true
Christian meaning of Easter when
he barbecued over 600 bunnies for
a special Easter Sunday dinner last
month.

I don’t know if it was black tie
or not, but don’t you wish you’d
been there? No?

The good Rev. Larry Rice dish-
ed up grilled rabbit, sauteed rab-
bit, and rabbit cacciatore to the
poor and homeless at The New
Life Centre in downtown St.
Louis. Talk about your St. Louis
Easter Parade! Have Bugs and
Roger heard about this?!

There was a choice cornucopia
of titillating tidbits last month,
such as Popeye’s switch from
spinach to mush, but they'll have
to wait for another taste-testing,
tale-telling column.

Right now I have to break for
lunch. Without any worms! (Insert
the Bugs Bunny cartoon closing
theme; move from camera one to
three, and pull back; fade io
black.)

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CLOSING ITS DOORS!

z.

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