Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 29, 1995                   TAG: 9503290021
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WE AMERICANS HAVE BOOKED PASSAGE ON A FAT-FREE GUILT TRIP

I rue the day, as we often said in Radford, that I started paying attention to those nutrition labels on food.

When you're young, you don't care about calories or fat or protein or cholesterol or any of that stuff.

You sucked down three grilled-cheese sandwiches with a chocolate shake after school.

You thought anybody who cooked pinto beans without fatback was a barbarian.

You knocked off three slices of lemon meringue pie after supper and you ended the day at the neighborhood steak house with a cheeseburger that took a good man to lift. And a vanilla shake, because you liked to eat light just before bedtime.

Now, what are we doing? We're caving in as a people, that's what. We don't know boldness in eating anymore. We read the nutrition label.

You'd kill for one of Mother Hepplewhite's fried pies but the label says it's 460 calories.

Fat content is the worst thing we have to deal with. In the first place, few of us have any idea of how much fat is bad for us. And show me a fat-free food and I'll show you something that tastes funny.

I believe in fairness and I think food companies ought to be compelled to put a label on fat-free products warning that what you're about to eat tastes like denatured linoleum.

If you want to become suicidal, or at least cry your eyes out, try a fat-free bagel smeared with fat-free cream cheese for breakfast.

Pretty soon, everything will be fat-free and we'll have all of these skinny people living in a declining civilization and not caring.

Literature will cease to exist and great scientific achievements will be no more. It's well known that skinny people eat too much broccoli, which contains a well-known enzyme that inhibits the creative areas of the brain.

Even so, broccoli remains sacred. With the exception of George Bush, nobody has ever said anything bad about broccoli.

Soon, a consitutional amendment will ban Mother Hepplewhite's pies and the mob will be selling them for a buck a calorie.

I'm trying to save this country for my grandchildren. I won't be here when the nonfats take over. I'll have pined away for a hit of cheesy western by then.