100503- A joke

.....Back in the eighties the Reagan administration did everything they could to prevent the FDA from protecting the American public. The argument was that market forces would tell us what was safe to eat, that experimentation and testing was just a waste of tax dollars. To prove their point, they forced the FDA to sit on their hands while a chemical additive called Olestra, on which they had placed restrictions for fifteen years, was used to make fat-free potato chips. After thousands of people spent far more money going to their doctors than the FDA would have spent in taxes, makers of the chips still didn't pull Olestra products from the market but instead announced that they "forgot" to add a warning which, they felt, would absolve them of any legal responsibility.

.....Now here's the kicker: the disclaimer/warning became a news item when it conceded that products cooked in Olestra "may cause spontaneous rectal bleeding". It should be pointed out that the chemical causes diarrhea in nearly everyone, which only leads to hemorrhaging if you're stupid enough to keep eating a product guaranteed to give you diarrhea until you bleed. Still, it's a phrase that turns heads at parties, I'll give you that. More than that, it's a neat condensation of a personality test. In any sufficiently large sampling of people, if you were to ask each one which word in that phrase they find most alarming, I would wager that most would say "bleeding", as though other forms of spontaneous rectal activity were... uh, negotiable? For others, "rectal" would concern them most; I'll leave the Freudian interpretations of that to yourselves. There would even be others for whom "spontaneous" would cause more anxiety, that a negative side effect would seem more manageable if it were more predictable. Me? The one word in that sentence that I home in on has to be "may". It "may cause spontaneous rectal bleeding". It says, "We had some indication that it might cause spontaneous rectal bleeding but we didn't see any pressing need to nail that down before we made food for you out of it."