Photo courtesy of Google Images
Robert Beeland
Staff Writer
So the naysayers are back with some ridiculous propaganda. Apparently, processed meats cause cancer. So what? Did you actually think that the Slim Jims you’ve been eating in Costco-sized quantities were helping that 300 LDL Cholesterol of yours? There’s enough Sodium Nitrite in 1,400 Slim Jims to kill you. We’ve always known this. Stop acting like this is shocking.
Is that really what you care about, though? No, you care about jumping out of airplanes and Fight Club. You care about watching 500pound linebackers act like human missiles while shoving as many chicken wings into your gullet as possible. That’s not crazy, that’s American. What exactly am I talking about? I’m talking about the death wish that every single one of us has, deep down in our subconscious, waiting to pounce.
You know the feeling: you’re driving down the highway in your Toyota towards the nearest Walmart so that you can buy another pack of Bubba Burgers and a case of Mountain Dew. All of a sudden, you’re overcome by a dark, chaotic thought. “What if I just drove this Camry over a cliff? What if I rid my soul of its corporeal shell and set it free?” I tell you what would happen. You’d feel liberated. You don’t want to be healthy; you want to grab life by the horns and ride that baby all the way to Vegas. Who cares how many Italian subs you eat along the way? I sure as hell don’t.
We’ve known that Polish Dog was going to kill you for years now, but Kobayashi doesn’t care. He’s a hero. Are you going to let some smarty-pants kale junkie scientist bore you with some dumb statistic about how eating a bologna sandwich will increase your likelihood of getting colorectal cancer by a thousandth of a percent? As far as I’m concerned, just about everything will give you cancer. So don’t just sit back in your La-Z-Boy and let yourself rot. Eat some beer jerky and conquer the world.
“You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself get cancer, because you ate way too much bacon, fatty” me wearing a Batman But seriously, you’re probably going to get cancer. Your cells are multiplying rapidly every second of every day for years on end, recreating, editing, and modifying your genetic code of like 3 billion base molecules. They’re going to mess up. It’s bound to happen. Imagine a 14yearold girl on Twitter, banging away at her iPhone’s touchscreen, blasting 140charactersorless messages into the black hole we call the Internet. Regardless of how adept her teenaged thumbs might be or how sophisticated her musings are, she’s bound to overlook the substitution of “fro” for “for” or some similar error. But, of course, the consequences here are minimal. And most of the time, that’s the case with your cells’ tweets. But sometimes the biochemical grammatical errors are so egregious, they go viral. And cancer is tragic; don’t get me wrong. You, I, and millions of others have had our lives touched in some manner or another by this seemingly senseless disease. I’m not here to make light of cancer or any life-threatening disease for that matter. This I take (among very few other things) very seriously. But for the love of God, put the Slim Jim down. Not only is red meat—especially heavily processed red meat—regarded by the scientific community to contain likely-carcinogenic compounds, but it’s just generally irresponsible to consume. The fact that we consume so much red meat to begin with, despite the enormous environmental impact of raising cattle and the ethical issue of mass beef and pork production, is really unbelievable. We shouldn’t need motivation to curtail our red meat consumption, and I’m not here to motivate you, you crazed consumer of quadrupeds. Instead, I’m going to give you a solution: eat bugs.
Bugs? Yes bugs. Crickets, mealworms, ants, bamboo worms, centipedes, cicadas, dragonflies, hell, eat some spiders while you’re at it. Bugs are packed with protein, low on fat, and F#$*ING EVERYWHERE. Ant infestation? Eat ‘em! Scared of spiders? They can’t scare you if you eat them all! Face it: insectivorism is the future. Leave the cows alone. They’ve got no beef with you.
I’ll see myself out.