You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News Page 13

  As for those new chemically engineered low-fat miracle foods, studies show no evidence that they have any effect on heart or overall body health. Eleftheria Maratos-Flier, director of obesity research at Harvard’s Joslin Diabetes Center says, “For a large percentage of the population, perhaps 30 to 40 percent, low-fat diets are counterproductive. They have the paradoxical effect of making people gain weight.”

  Nutritionists hold out hope that we might turn a corner in the next fifteen years though, when the costs of airlifting children to school passes the $500 billion mark.

  THE GRUESOME ORIGINS OF FIVE POPULAR FAIRY TALES

  FAIRY tales weren’t always for kids. Back when these stories were first told in the taverns of medieval villages, there were very few kids present. These were racy, violent parables to distract peasants after a hard day’s dirt farming, and some of them made Hostel look like, well, kid’s stuff.

  5. LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD: INTERSPECIES SEX PLAY, CANNIBALISM

  The version you know

  On her way to her grandmother’s, Little Red Riding Hood meets the Big Bad Wolf and stupidly tells him where she’s going. He gets there first, eats Grandma, puts on her dress, and waits for Red.

  She gets there, they do the back-and-forth about what big teeth he has, and he eats her. Then, a passing woodsman comes and cuts Red and Grandma out of the wolf, saving the day.

  What got changed

  Like many fairy tales, the modern version of “Little Red Riding Hood” comes from Frenchman Charles Perrault’s seventeenth-century Mother Goose tales. While Perrault collected and retold the folktales for children, he wasn’t afraid to straight-up kill some bitches to make a point.

  The big thing that changed about this one since Perrault’s version is the ending. That woodsman showing up seemed a little like a third-act movie rewrite due to bad test screening, didn’t it?

  In Perrault’s version of the story, Red and her grandmother are dead. The. Goddamn. End.

  Perrault’s was the PG version of the tale he’d probably heard as a boy. According to a collection of oral folktales from the Middle Ages, the earlier versions liked to spice up the sexual undertones, having Red catch on to the wolf and perform a striptease while he’s lying in bed dressed as her grandmother before running away while he’s “distracted” (note to any young girls: If you are ever abducted and menaced by someone, do not do this!).

  Wait, it gets worse. In some of the early folktales, the Wolf dissects Grandmother, then invites Red in for a meal of her flesh, Hannibal Lecter-style.

  Sweet dreams!

  4. SNOW WHITE: PRINCE PEDOPHILE, MORE CANNIBALISM

  The version you know

  Evil stepmom hates that her daughter is prettier than her, so she tells one of her men to take her out to the woods, kill her, and bring back her heart as proof. He can’t follow through, so he tells her to run away.

  Snow White flees and falls in with seven dwarves. The stepmom finds out and sneaks her a poison apple. Snow goes into a coma until a handsome prince rescues her and they live happily ever after.

  What got changed

  In the Disney film, the wicked stepmother winds up dead, so that’s already pretty hard-core. It’s got nothing on the German Grimm brothers, who wrote over a hundred years after Perrault and are probably the second most popular source for modern fairy tales. In their version, the stepmother is tortured by being forced to wear red-hot iron shoes and made to dance until she falls down dead.

  The issue of Snow’s actual age is a point of contention as well. The Grimms explicitly refer to her as being seven years old when the story starts, and while there’s no firm indication of how much time has passed, it can’t be more than a couple of years. So unless that’s an eight-year-old prince who comes along and rescues Snow, we’re backing away from this one.

  The biggest thing we cut out of the Grimms’ version, and the bloodiest, is the stepmom’s unusual eating habits. Namely, when she asks her guy to bring back the heart of Snow White, she isn’t just after proof that the girl is dead. She wants to eat it. Depending on the version of the story, the stepmother asks for Snow’s liver, lungs, intestines, or pretty much every other major internal organ, up to and including a bottle of Snow’s blood stoppered with her toe.

  3. RUMPELSTILTSKIN: DISMEMBERMENT, DEAD TODDLERS

  The version you know

  The king sentences a beautiful woman to be executed in three days unless she can follow through on her father’s claim that she can spin straw into gold (the legal system back then took a much harsher stance on ridiculous bullshit). Luckily, a gnome shows up and offers to spin gold in exchange for her firstborn child. She accepts, the gnome spins her gold, and the king is so impressed that he decides to marry her.

  The king and his new queen have a son, and the little gnome shows up demanding the boy unless the queen can guess his name in three days. She tries everything but comes up short, until a passing woodsman overhears the gnome bragging about how he’s so clever that no one will guess his name is Rumpelstiltskin. The woodsman immediately tells the queen, who springs it on Rumpelstiltskin, who’s so pissed off that he throws a tantrum and runs away, presumably to ply his poorly thought-out scam in another town.

  What got changed

  In the Grimm brothers’ version, the little man is so pissed off that he stamps the floor in his little hissy fit and gets stuck. And then he pulls so hard to free himself that he tears himself in half. Now, if our names were Rumpelstiltskin and some pretty girl told the whole damn room, we’d be pissed too, but we don’t think we’d get dismemberment-angry.

  In the early folktales on which the Grimm version was based, Rumpelstiltskin launches himself at the girl in a rage and gets stuck, um, in her lady parts. Like a gynecological “Humpty Dumpty,” the palace guards have to come and pull him out, which must have made for some awkward looks afterward.

  Also, in a depressingly large number of the early versions the child is killed anyway, either by Rumpelstiltskin himself or the guards. They weren’t big on happy endings in the Dark Ages.

  2. SLEEPING BEAUTY: COMA SEX

  The version you know

  “Sleeping Beauty” is the story of a young princess who is cursed by an evil witch so that she will prick her finger on a spindle and die on her fifteenth birthday. Fortunately, a nonevil old lady finds out and tempers the curse—the princess won’t die, she’ll just fall asleep for a hundred years.

  Of course the king orders all spindles burned, plunging the kingdom into a fashion nightmare, but with the inevitability of fairy-tale logic bearing down on her, the princess manages to find the one working spindle in the kingdom and pricks her finger on her fifteenth birthday. She falls asleep for a hundred years, until a dashing young prince comes along in timely fashion and kisses her, breaking the spell.

  What got changed

  Seventeenth-century Italian poet and collector of fairy tales Giambattista Basile wrote an early version in which the princess instead gets a piece of flax caught under her fingernail, which puts her to sleep. This might seem like a small difference but stick around.

  Basile’s version then has the prince who finds the sleeping princess think she’s so damn beautiful that he just goes ahead and has his way with her right then and there, while she’s still comatose.

  If that’s not disturbing enough, the Rohypnol-style coupling leads to a pregnancy, and the princess gives birth to twins, all while asleep. One of the babies, seeking Momma’s milk, sucks on her finger and dislodges the flax, waking her, at which point we imagine she had a few questions.

  1. CINDERELLA: MUTILATION, SEX, MORE MUTILATION

  The version you know

  You all know it: The stepmother and stepsisters hate beautiful Cinderella and make her work all day. One day a fairy godmother shows up and gives Cinderella pretty clothes and a pumpkin coach and sends her to the ball where she falls in love with the prince.

  But at the stroke of midnight it all ends, and she runs home, leaving
only her glass slipper behind. The prince searches the land, finds Cinderella, the shoe fits, and they live happily ever after.

  What got changed

  Everyone seemed to have a version of this one. A famous difference in many of the stories is the glass slipper. Authorities on fairy tales (whom you tend not to see at parties) disagree about whether Perrault’s slipper was made of glass or fur, as the words in French (verre and vair) are pronounced almost identically. It’s kind of important, because if the prince was wandering the land looking for a lady with the perfect “fur slipper,” well, it doesn’t take Freud to figure that one out. Suddenly the prince doesn’t look so noble.

  One thing Perrault left out that the Grimms delighted in putting back was the violence. The sisters, desperate to fit into the slipper, mutilate their own feet, cutting off their toes and heels in exquisite Germanic detail. When the prince eventually realizes that Cinderella is the one for him, birds peck out the sisters’ and mother’s eyes for their wickedness.

  You can probably understand why Disney went with Perrault’s ending for its adaptation.

  FIVE HORRIFYING FOOD ADDITIVES YOU’VE PROBABLY EATEN TODAY

  DECIPHERING food labels is tricky business. They’re filled with lots of multisyllabic words that border on being impossible to pronounce, chemicals that sound like they could kill you just by touching them, and much, much worse. Read on, unless you’ve eaten recently.

  5. SHELLAC

  Most everyone is familiar with shellac as a wood-finishing product. It’s often used to give furniture, guitars, and even AK-47’s that special shine. But did you know that it is also commonly used as a food additive? Yep, that’s why those jelly beans you gorge on every Easter are so shiny.

  But what exactly is shellac?

  Are you sure you want to know?

  Shellac is derived from the excretions of an insect, Kerria lacca, most commonly found in the forests of Thailand. Kerria lacca uses the slime as a means to stick to the trees on which it lives. Candy makers then come along and harvest the Kerria lacca excretion by scraping it right off the tree. Unfortunately for you and your future enjoyment of shiny candies, this leaves little room for quality control measures to guarantee that the insects aren’t scooped up as well.

  Once that happens, and it almost always does, the insects simply become part of the shellac-making process. And the candy-making process. And the candy-eating process.

  Don’t eat candy? That’s OK: You’re probably eating bugs too. During the cleaning process, apples lose their natural shine. Care to guess how it’s restored?

  If all of this is making you a bit queasy, we understand. It’s not every day that you find out you’ve been celebrating the resurrection of Jesus by consuming handfuls of insect-infused treats your entire life. But before you head to the medicine cabinet, consider this. That pill you want to take to quell your nausea? It didn’t get shiny on its own.

  4. BONE CHAR

  The sugar you put on your cereal in the morning didn’t start out white. It’s naturally brown—a color the food industry apparently decided was undesirable. To make their product more acceptable to whitey, sugar companies use a filtering process to strip it of its color. In some cases, the process involves boring sciency words like ions and such. But sugar derived from sugarcane (about a quarter of the sugar in the United States) goes through a … different process.

  Domino, the largest sugar producer in America, uses something called bone char to filter impurities from its sugar. Bone char is produced using the bones of cows from India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan that have died from “natural causes,” as opposed to cows who forget to wear a helmet when riding their motorcycles.

  The bones are bleached in the sun and sold to marketers who then sell them to the U.S. sugar industry. Sugar companies then heat the bones until charred, at which point they are used to filter the sugar that keeps you fat and happy.

  We don’t know by what alchemy this method purifies the sugar, but since they go out of their way to use ground-up cow bones from India—a country where that animal is often considered sacred—we have to assume Satan is involved.

  3. CARMINE

  Carmine can also be identified on food labels as crimson lake, cochineal, Natural Red 4, CI 75470, or E120. We mention that because we’re guessing you’ll want to check for it after reading this.

  If you’re eating something red right now, or have recently, you’re probably eating carmine, which is ground-up cochineal insects—essentially mashed red beetles. Because you’re dying to know more, the insects are killed by exposure to heat or immersion in hot water and then dried. Because the female abdominal region that houses the fertilized eggs contains the most carmine, it is separated from the rest of the body, ground into a powder, and cooked at high temperatures to extract the maximum amount of color.

  Then it’s added to that yogurt you ate this morning while lording your health consciousness over the guy in the cubicle next to you who had an Egg McMuffin.

  Food manufacturers are well aware that word has gotten out about exactly what carmine is and that people are less than crazy about it. So a number of crafty manufacturers have resorted to labeling it not as carmine but instead as “natural color,” thereby guaranteeing you’ll never really know for sure if your cherry ice cream contains the USDA recommended amount of creepy crawlers.

  Hey, speaking of that …

  2. NATURAL FLAVOR

  When it comes to food, most of us get nervous when people are intentionally vague. We steer clear of the street vendor selling “meat soup” and “food burritos.”

  So when you see that a label has included “natural flavor,” you should be equally alarmed. If you’re thinking the natural flavor in your orange candy must have come from oranges, think again. If it was from oranges, they would say so right on the can. It would be a selling point.

  The problem is, natural flavor can be anything that isn’t man-made. Cat urine could be a natural flavor. If someone discovered that goat jizz added a special zing to ice cream and they could prove that eating it wouldn’t make you sick: natural flavor. And because they know people would rather see the word natural on the label than some fancy-pants chemical compound, it’s actually in their interest to go with the goat jizz.

  One potentially disturbing example of natural flavor gone bad comes from—where else?—McDonald’s. Back in 1990, amid constant public outcry about the amount of cholesterol in its french fries, McDonald’s started using pure vegetable oil in its fryers.

  Wait, what were they using before? Why, beef lard. When they stopped using it, and McDonald’s realized that fried potatoes don’t taste as good without some molten beef added, it was “natural flavor” to the rescue.

  When vegetarian groups demanded to know what the mystery flavor was, company reps would only say it was “animal derived.”

  They wouldn’t say what animal. According to the book Fast Food Nation, “Beef is the probable source, although other meats cannot be ruled out. In France, for example, fries are sometimes cooked in duck fat or horse tallow.” Now, we all know how uptight French people are about their food. If their fries are being boiled in the processed knee joints of Kentucky Derby hopefuls, what does that mean for us Americans? Use your imagination.

  1. BACTERIOPHAGES

  In 2006, the FDA approved the use of bacteriophages to fight Listeria microbes on lunch meat, wieners, and sausages. If you’re unfamiliar with the term bacteriophages, let us put it in a layman’s term for you: viruses.

  In this case, six viruses, to be exact. There is an excellent chance that ham sandwich you had for lunch this afternoon was sprayed with a mixture of six different viruses in an effort to fight a microbe that kills hundreds of people a year. Hundreds. Approximately the same number of people that die in plane crashes. Because of this clear and present danger, your lunch meat is slathered with an array of viruses.

  This probably sounds bad enough already, but wait until you hear Intralytix, the compan
y that developed the bacteriophage mixture, explain exactly how the virus works. “Typical phages have hollow heads that store their viral DNA and tunnel tails with tips that bind to specific molecules on the surface of their target bacteria. The viral DNA is injected through the tail into the host cell, where it directs the production of progeny phages.”

  We’ll take it from here. The battlefield on which this virus-versus-microbe war plays out is the bologna that you used to prepare your afternoon lunch. Around the same time the hollow-headed bacteriophages were storming the beach at Listeria, you were lifting that bologna sandwich to your mouth. Just as the phages were thrusting their hollow, viral-DNA-filled tails into the host cells (also living on your sandwich), you were jamming the whole nasty battle right down your oblivious gullet.

  If you’ve ever tried the Subway diet without success, this might be a good time to give it another shot. If thinking about the rampant virus-versus-microbe violence you’re about to ingest doesn’t put you off eating for the rest of the day, then nothing will, tubby.

  FIVE STORIES THE MEDIA DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT

  AT its best, the media is a knife at the throat of tyrants everywhere, the ever-watchful guardian of the interests of the people. Unfortunately, it’s rarely at its best—hell, you’re lucky if it puts on pants in the morning. More often than not it’s, uh … this.

  5. USA TODAY‘S STAR REPORTER LIES TO THE PUBLIC … FOR TWENTY-ONE YEARS

  When It Happened: 1991-2004

  News Agencies Involved: USA Today

  Back in 2004, USA Today was the most widely read newspaper in the United States, and its star reporter was Jack Kelley, a Pulitzer Prize-winning twenty-one-year newspaper veteran notorious for getting impossible scoops. He wrote gripping first-person accounts of riding with Army Special Forces to catch bin Laden; watching a Pakistani student unfold a picture of the Sears Tower and say, “This one is mine,” in 2001; and infiltrating bands of terrorists around the world. He was like Jack Bauer, only with a pen instead of a pistol (and judging from Bauer having never once moved his bowels in 192 hours of screen time, equally full of shit).