And that’s not the only fine print. After detailing various laboratory tests done on mice—and really, what could be a more dignified end for a lab mouse than giving up its life so that humanity can combat the scourge of not-quite-thick-enough eyelashes?—the Latisse information sheet notes: “Because animal reproductive studies are not always predictive of human response, Latisse should be administered during pregnancy only if the potential benefit justifies the potential risk to the fetus.”
Miranda, sit down. You’re probably wondering about some of the things that make you different from other children, such as the brown pigment in your eyes, and your third arm. Mommy loved being pregnant with you. But Mommy also loves having hooker-grade eyelashes, so …
It just makes you wonder: What could possibly be left on a woman for drug companies to “cure”? Even now, I’m sure science is trying to help ladies overcome the horror of chubby tonsils, knuckle wrinkles and the condition known as “having elbows.”
Unless, of course, science is too busy trying to help people stay thin, which, come to think of it, it probably is. One of the more recent advances in this field is a drug that combines all the health benefits of losing weight with the unforgettable thrill of pooping yourself in public.
The drug is GlaxoSmithKline’s Alli, which was released for over-the-counter sale after years of painstaking research and unspeakable crimes against underpants.
The upside of Alli is that it can help people on a diet lose up to 50 percent more weight. The downside is that this weight is likely to depart the body in the form of—in the company’s own words … its graphic, unforgettable, dream-haunting words—“loose stools,” “more frequent stools that may be hard to control,” and “gas with oily spotting,” which sounds like an alternative rock band or a Jackson Pollock technique, but no, in this case refers to terrifyingly explosive farts. Congratulations! You just lost three pounds, forty-eight friends and one job!
Ours is a society schooled to anticipate the inevitable “side effect” segment of every upbeat drug commercial (some users may experience headache, nausea, stigmata, transsexuality and the medical condition commonly known as Karl Malden nose), yet still the weight-loss particulars grab our attention. Loose stools? That may be hard to control?? GlaxoSmithKline refers to these as “treatment effects.” With all due respect, a runny nose is a “treatment effect.” Heartburn—that is a “treatment effect.” Soiling yourself in public is really more of a “now I have no choice but to relocate to a different hemisphere because my life here is completely ruined effect.”
Given the sensitivity of the issue, one can only imagine the gruelling series of rewrites to which these “treatment effects” were subjected:
Writer No. 1: How about we call them “unstable stools”?
Writer No. 2: Sounds like something you’d buy at ikea. “Freedom feces”?
Writer No. 1: Patriotic!
Unlike certain weight-loss drugs, Alli (pronounced “ally,” as in: if you want to lose some of your weight and all your dignity, Alli is your ally!) does nothing to reduce your desire to eat. Instead, it stops the body from breaking down and absorbing fat—a remarkable scientific achievement, really, if you take away the whole crapping-your-pants part. In fact, GlaxoSmithKline claims Alli is able to block about 25 percent of the fat you eat while simultaneously grossing out 100 percent of the people sitting next to you on the bus.
But really, how common can these so-called treatment effects be? Well, the actual makers of this actual drug actually advise users to “bring a change of clothes to work,” and suggest that it’s probably a “smart idea” to wear dark pants. It is also recommended that users practise pointing at the fat guy in the next cubicle and whispering to everyone, “It was Neil.”
If surrendering power of attorney over your anus is not alarming enough—and judging by Alli’s brisk sales, it’s not—consider that the drug helps you lose weight only if you’re already losing weight by eating a low-fat diet. Plus the drug company warns that “you may need to continue taking Alli” just to maintain your weight loss. Heck, take it for long enough and you may get Superman-quick at ditching your fouled underthings in phone booths!
The drug’s website showcases many photographs of happy, smiling women attired in white pants. Clearly these women cannot be using Alli. They must have snuck over from a Levitra ad. In any event, the site offers a number of important advisories for people who decide to use Alli. The actual tips are in quotes below; the italics are mine:
“The excess fat that passes out of your body is not harmful. In fact, you may recognize it as something that looks like the oil on top of a pizza.” Not sure any of us will need Alli now that we’ll never eat pizza again.
“You may not usually get gassy, but it’s a possibility when you take Alli. The bathroom is really the best place to go when that happens.” In fact, it’s probably best just to move your desk in there.
“You can use a food journal to recognize what foods can lead to treatment effects. For example, writing down what you eat may help you learn that marinara sauce is a better option than Alfredo sauce.” One can only guess, with mounting horror and stomach-turning unease, what must have happened during the laboratory pasta test to warrant Alfredo sauce being singled out in this way. Suffice to say the findings form the basis for North Korea’s next weapons test.
“[If you] take Alli capsules as directed, you should see results in the first two weeks.” Results include going home each night with a briefcase full of shame and the bestowing upon you by your office colleagues the nickname “Stinkybum.”
“In case of overdose, get medical help or contact a Poison Control Centre right away.” An overdose?! You may want to bring along three hundred to four hundred extra pairs of dark pants.
Of course, no matter how effective it is, Alli has its work cut out for it, especially in the United States.
To walk into an American supermarket these days is to marvel unblinkingly at the miracle of it all. There used to be just Snickers. Now there are 80 different kinds of Snickers, including Snickers Charged—a chocolate bar jammed with caffeine. There used to be ice cream. Now there are 47,000 different brands of ice cream, including American Idol Mint Karaoke Cookie (dig in—you can really taste the Keith Urban!). There used to be sausages and pancakes. Now there are Jimmy Dean sausages wrapped in chocolate-chip pancakes and served on a stick. One day the scientists of the great nation of the United States will use their mighty brainpower to cure horrible ailments like cancer and marrying Newt Gingrich. But first they have much to teach the developing world about wrapping one thing inside another thing, and then placing both things on a stick.
Today’s food-based innovation in American supermarkets is all about convenience. Remember how making a hot dog used to be so difficult and time-consuming? Me neither. But apparently it was, because Oscar Mayer went and created something called Fast Frank—three wieners prepackaged inside three “soft and warm buns” placed in three paper trays, and each ready to be eaten after thirty-five seconds in the microwave. You just remove the outer packaging, pick up the wiener, remove its individual packaging, wipe that tear from the cheek of Iron Eyes Cody, place the wiener back in the bun, nuke it and laugh heartily in the face of China and its backward, water-boiling ways.
Not that these hot dogs are perfect yet. Oscar Mayer claims it created Fast Franks “to satisfy America’s love for hot dogs in a more convenient way.” That’s a noble goal and a good start—but the sad reality is that consumers still have to chew the wiener and bun themselves. Americans are busy people, Oscar Mayer: call them when your franks are fast and pre-masticated.
For sheer convenience, it is hard to imagine a greater advance than that achieved by the super-geniuses at Smucker’s who created a product they call Uncrustables—a package of four, ten or eighteen frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with the crusts cut off. “All you do is thaw and s
erve,” Smucker’s boasts. “A simple way to enjoy one of life’s simple pleasures.”
Finally, at long last, someone has found a way to simplify the gruelling peanut butter and jelly ordeal. No longer shall our stoutest men be forced to toil all day in the jelly mines. No more shall our womenfolk be enslaved to operate the elaborate and often lethal system of levers and pulleys required to press together two slices of bread. Never again shall defenceless children be confronted with the monstrous indignity of having to ingest bread’s hard and foul and brown outer layer.
Sure, each Smucker’s Uncrustable has high-fructose corn syrup not only in the jelly but (somehow!) in the bread. And sure, the ingredients for the bread alone list almost a dozen different chemicals under the heading “Dough Conditioners.” But when the alternative is sacrificing as many as nine precious seconds to spread peanut butter and then also jelly, well … suffice to say, the Middle Ages called: they’d like their way of making sandwiches back.
Tough Question: How would some of today’s leading sports, entertainment and political figures make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?
Justin Bieber
Recruit a twelve-member entourage to make him a single peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Hurl peanut butter and jelly sandwich against the wall, shouting, “Why wasn’t this made by a monkey??”
Remove shirt.
Stephen Harper
As a matter of reflex, immediately launch a negative ad campaign against ham sandwiches.
Meticulously position bread, peanut butter and jelly on kitchen counter.
Warn of grave threat to national economy if anyone else is entrusted to assemble the sandwich.
Write a boring book about old sandwiches.
Don Cherry
Start making one sandwich, then stop midway, failing to finish it.
Start making another sandwich, then lose his train of thought, failing to finish it.
Start making a third sandwich, but somehow instead wind up talking about the military.
Give up and eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich made by Bobby Orr in 1973.
Rob Ford
“I do not eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, nor am I an addict of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”
“I can’t comment on a sandwich that doesn’t exist.”
“I just want to see the sandwich. The sandwich will answer a lot of questions.”
“I wish I could defend myself, but right now this sandwich is before the food court.”
“Yes, I have eaten a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while in one of my luncheon stupors.”
Zdeno Chara
Assemble ingredients for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Stare menacingly at them until the sandwich makes itself.
Miley Cyrus
Nail two slices of bread to a wall.
Apply ample amounts of peanut butter to one bum cheek.
Apply ample amounts of jelly to the other bum cheek.
Turn on music.
Barack Obama
Publicly reveal his intention to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Mull over, at some length, how best to make the sandwich.
Assemble a team of experts with decades of experience in the making of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
Consult with inner circle of advisers, all of whom have doctorates in theoretical sandwich making.
Deliver eloquent address to Congress promising decisive action soon to resolve the ongoing sandwich crisis.
Spend weekend at Camp David enumerating the pros and cons of white bread.
Travel to Britain to explore the ancestry of the fourth Earl of Sandwich.
Lift knife toward peanut butter jar and … but wait, is a knife really the right utensil for the job? If you think about it, a spoon can more easily accommodate a greater quantity of …
Die of hunger.
Thomas Mulcair
Spread peanut butter on a slice of bread.
Spread jelly on a second slice of bread.
Press together the two slices of bread.
Eat this perfectly good peanut butter and jelly sandwich while standing alone at a microphone as thirty-eight reporters ask Justin Trudeau about weed.
So yes, on one hand, for some in our society there’s the organics movement, the 100-Mile Diet, slow dining, grass-fed cattle and flying to Indonesia to offer a soothing massage to the migrant worker who harvested your coffee beans. For the rest of us, it’s a miraculous age in which science has made it possible for us to consume our Special K in liquid form and there are products such as Kraft Bagel-fuls—in which a bagel-type substance comes wrapped around wads of cream cheese—available in your grocer’s freezer. Half the taste and four million times the chemicals!
Bagel-fuls offer value in two key areas:
Relief: Recent statistics indicate that spreading cream cheese on a bagel is causing 70 percent of North Americans to get winded. Another 12 percent keep trying to spread the bagel onto the cream cheese.
Productivity: With the four seconds they save by not having to spread cream cheese themselves, everyone in America is going to study to be an astronaut.
Kraft touts its Bagel-fuls by highlighting their “convenient shape”—long, like a Twinkie, because apparently humankind can’t quite master how to wrap its hands around “round”—and the fact that cramming one into your face requires “no plates, mess or effort!” Plus, now we don’t have to lick flame-retardant materials for our daily hit of ammonium sulfate.
Certainly one day in the near future these pioneers of food convenience will ensure that all oranges and bananas come pre-peeled, that hamburgers and hot dogs are sold in liquid form, that all soups are packaged inside a syringe for speedier internalizing. Perhaps one day these sultans of expediency will invent a cereal with the milk already in it, and the spoon already in the cereal, and the cereal and milk and spoon already in your colon.
When it comes to fast food, meanwhile, the focus is equally on innovation. Everyone is aiming to duplicate the impact that Kentucky Fried Chicken achieved a few years back with its Double Down, a bacon-and-cheese sandwich that features two pieces of fried chicken in place of the traditional bun. It has been described by nutritionists as an affront to human health, by scientists as a potential contributor to childhood obesity and by Kirstie Alley as a mfwwwwa ahhhsdfldnf. (Her mouth was full.)
The Double Down proves it: America may be losing its reputation as an invincible economic power, but it continues to outpace the world in making bread obsolete. Years ago, McDonald’s mutated its popular breakfast sandwich by replacing the English muffin with two pancakes, creating the McGriddle. Now KFC has nixed buns in favour of fried chicken. What’s next, America: Slices of meat loaf? Pork chops? Whole baby bears? Panda Pockets! New at Burger King!
Other innovations abound, including:
IHOP’s Pancake Stackers, a thick hunk of cheesecake lodged between two buttermilk pancakes and served with fruit compote, whipped topping and a long, disapproving stare from your wife. As part of a breakfast combo, the Stackers meal delivers more than two-thirds of your recommended daily intake of calories, more than 100 percent of your daily sodium and a full week’s worth of “angry bowel.”
Hardee’s Loaded Biscuit ’N’ Gravy. Hardee’s splits a buttermilk biscuit in two and tops each side with an egg, a sausage patty, a generous helping of “famous sausage gravy” and one of the two paddles from the defibrillator. Bite, chew … clear!
Now sure, America’s fascination with creating ever-larger burgers and waistlines may seem like a symptom of an indulgent culture. But there is method to the high-cal madness: eating less healthil
y may be America’s only shot at thriving economically in the twenty-first century.
Think it through. Manufacturing has declined across the United States. The country’s trade deficit is huge. And one of its most dynamic growth industries so far this century—Bieber-style haircuts—was inspired by a Canadian.
But by eating Double Downs and Pancake Stackers, Americans increase their need for prescription medication to lower their cholesterol, manage their blood pressure and keep their heart from, in medical parlance, exploding. That means profits for drug companies, more jobs for Americans and a stronger economy. The Double Down is not a plot to kill America. It’s a plot to save America.
Getting fat is the most patriotic thing an American can do today. Each mouth is its own stimulus program. Citizens begin by supporting fast-food companies, then they enrich the drug companies and, ultimately, they politely die of wholesale organ failure just before they use up any Social Security money. Deficit tamed.
To make this happen, to deliver on this New Meal Deal, Americans are going to need to keep inventing new and more calorie-laden creations to ingest. They will need ingenuity, determination and, eventually, a tremendous amount of insulin. And hey, if pursuing economic prosperity happens to taste delicious, that’s just gravy. Delicious sausage gravy.
So let’s keep the wheels of innovation in motion:
The Bigger Mac. Take two Big Macs. Replace the buns of one Big Mac with the beef patties from the other Big Mac. Eat the four-patty Big Mac. Enjoy. Then eat what’s left of the other Big Mac. Then eat the extra buns, the ketchup packets and the tray liner. That little girl two tables over—is she going to finish those fries?
The Future and Why We Should Avoid It Page 10
