Historical November 1985 report or notice. Original dates, prices and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction.
Oh, I know, that’s a phrase that you hear all of the time, so much so that it has lost a bit of meaning.
After all, in this little column I’ve touched upon a number of issues, most of them ludicrous, farfetched, and downright silly.
A recent article in the Post-Dispatch, however, tops anything I could ever imagine. “Food Experts Deplore Drift to Grazing” read the August 24 headline.
Mary Powers, a director of the Good Housekeeping Institute (honest!) notes, “The sit-down meal itself has already disappeared in some families.” She defines “grazing” as “a non-meal phenomenon where you don’t have scheduled mealtimes, but rather eat on the move in a busy life.” It gets better: “For some of this new generation of eat-and-run practitioners, even the task of heating a can of soup is too much, the experts say. Campbell Soup spokesman Jim Moran says his firm was considering making vegetable soup solidified like a candy bar.” Well! What’s wrong with America, anyway? I remember when home-cooked meals, “squares” we called ’em, were a staple in the American home!
If you ask me, this ain’t just one of them phenomenons that them educated-folk always talk about.
No siree. Sounds to me like this is some kind of a commie conspiracy. Sure, it’s easy to think that people are busy and don’t have time to cook, but let’s look a little deeper, friend.
If sitdown meals go, what’s next: baseball? Chevrolets? apple-pie? Boy George? Is nothing sacred around here?
Once the sit-down “squares” go, then when will people talk to one another?
We certainly don’t talk in the evenings (“… shhh, Captain Fiorello is about to say something”) or in the mornings (“Goodmorning
If I don’t have a fork in my hand or a napkin in my lap, I’m almost rendered talkless.
Now I don’t really know what the effect of this absence of talk would be.
I know that it wouldn’t be good, though. Years ago I saw a science-fiction movie, before they were popular, when believability centered more on plot than special effects.
The plot centered around things from outer space that attacked by taking over the bodies of people we knew and loved: friends, policemen, teachers, parents, even aldermen were all victims.
There was almost no way you Could tell that these people had been taken over by the alien beings.
The one clue was a mole-like thing they left on the back of peoples’ necks.
If you could see the mole—where the aliens had made their injection to take over the humans’ bodies—you knew that the person was really an inhabited shell!
As the movie ended, I remember, a young boy, kind of the hero of the piece, was rescued from the spacemen by a friendly judge.
As we saw them walk away, though, we could see the spot on the back of the judge’s neck. He, too, was possessed by the aliens. Now, I ask you, where would we be if that happened and because of these grazing dinners, nobody talked to one another?
Without “squares,” fully-cooked starchladen meals, I think we’re really vulnerable to attack by foreigners.
And by foreigners, I don’t mean Ruskies or them Iranians, either. I’m talking big league here; green men from Mars or, worse, things from planets that we don’t even know yet where credit cards are unheard of. Somebody right now is watching us, I bet, from afar with one of them telescopes.
Once they see the sit-downs go, it’s all over but the shouting. Katie, bar the door.
For the preservation of the world, then, for mom, apple pie, Ted Drewes, and Cindy Lauper, sit down and eat!
This is your mother speaking.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, November 1985.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1985_11.pdf, printed page(s) 8; PDF page(s) 8.
