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Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Mainstream humor

Published: November 2, 2012 1 minute 11 comments

Boy, a rough day for granolas on the funny pages! Several cartoonists decided this was the day to take a shot:

Let's start in the snacks aisle with Glenn McCoy and the Duplex:

Dp121102
Back when my new wife and I were ovo-lacto veggies, the idea of "organic Twinkies" would have been absurd. The only health food store in South Bend, Indiana, was in the front of somebody's house and didn't offer much at all, never mind any selection within what it did offer.

Which was okay, because we'd drive up to the Dunes, let the dogs run up and down the beach and then go over to Andrews, a Seventh Day Adventist college in Berrien Springs that had an excellent food store. And we also ordered raw milk cheese from a place Kathy had found in the Whole Earth Catalog. And she made our yoghurt.

Fast forward about two years and we'd dropped the veggie part but were still trying to avoid putting too much crap into our systems. By now we belonged to a co-op in Denver that opened a store and we found ourselves engaged in passionate debates over Tiger Milk bars, the pro-shitfood argument being that, since we sold fruit leather, why not sell these?

This is aside from the ongoing arguments over turbinado sugar vs. white sugar vs. honey which I think are still out there in that alternative universe.

Anyway, I guess I don't know whether it was the fruit leather or the Tiger Milk bars that proved to be the first step on the slippery slope, but most health food stores now stock a pretty large selection of groovy shitfood. If anyone is making some equivalent of an organic Twinkie, there's a slot for them near the checkout.

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Dave Blazek cracked me up with this bit of twisted logic in today's Loose Parts, but let me anticipate the argument from the health food gang by acknowledging that today's beef cattle, in fact, aren't vegetarian but are fed highly processed meat by-products that, in a cleaner and more organic world, would have gone straight from the killing floor to the hogs and chickens.

There's an element of "too much information" involved in these decisions that can lead to either paralysis or panic.

Either you decide that, if everything is corrupted, you might as well eat anything, or you can go the other direction and try to seek out only the purest of foods, realizing that the more popular quinoa becomes, the more you're going to have to read the label to make sure it wasn't fertilized with ground-up discarded organic Twinkies.

At least the information is out there, which it wasn't always. We gave up being vegetarian when a South Bend OB/GYN told my wife that, if she didn't eat meat, our baby wouldn't get the amino acids needed for proper brain development. Given that any dissenting information was going to come from sources known more for hipness than for rigorous science, we decided not to play Russian roulette with the next generation.

Nearly a decade later, a college friend who was both a vegetarian and a starting point guard in the NBA heard the story and, just off the top of his unmarried, not-yet-a-father head, named two or three things you could add to your diet to provide the necessary nutrients for an expectant mother. 

When your body is your instrument, you dig into the research a little deeper, I guess.

Side note: He wasn't an ethical vegetarian, just a dietary one, and not only ate dairy products but would have a little turkey at Thanksgiving. Today, Arian Foster — not yet born when that conversation took place — is one of the top runningbacks in the NFL and a full-out vegan. Meat may be tasty, but it sure ain't necessary to keep the instrument tuned.

And then there's this ridiculous panel from John McPherson at Close to Home:

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That probably won't get much of a laugh from people who really do question Western medicine because they don't seem to have much of a sense of humor about the topic. Not surprising, since it's more of a religious deal than a scientific one.

Traditional medicines got a boost on Nixon's China trip when NYTimes writer Scotty Reston was struck with appendicitis and had the operation with accupuncture as anesthesia. But there's a quick drop-off between genuine alternative medicine and hippie voodoo.

Don't ask me what I think of traditional medicine, though. Ask a rhinoceros.

But whatever arguments that may engender, I think we can all agree with Dave Whamond and today's Reality Check. Well, all of us who haven't flown into a fury and quit reading by now:

Rc121102
Not to fret. We'll be back making fun of guys-who-wear-ties tomorrow, I'm sure.

Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.

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Comments 11

  1. As an aside, over the past few years, I’ve gone to great lengths to cut a lot of crap out of my diet including, but not limited to:
    – Red Meat
    – Oils/Fatty Compounds (e.g. butter, sour cream)
    – Cheese
    – Fried Foods
    – Creamy Sauces
    – Chips
    At the same time, I’ve tried to include more of the following:
    – Fish
    – Beans
    – Legumes (e.g. Lentils)
    – Homemade Bread
    – Homemade smoothies (including only fruits and fruit juices)
    Mix this in with regular bicycling and jogging and I’ve managed to lose weight and feel much, much better than I ever did when I was eating shit food on a regular basis. I especially like dense foods that help me feel fuller without adding too many calories, such as beans, oatmeal and decent energy bars (like Clif bars).
    In fact, I just cook more than I used to. Granted, I’ve been cooking food since I left college, but as of late, I’ve been learning more healthy recipes as of late and getting my girlfriend (a terribly picky eater) to actually eat what I make more frequently with less complaints.
    Homemade bread was also a nice addition to my diet, considering I know what’s going in (for the most part) and it tends to have more flavor than whatever you get at the grocery store.
    A natural extension of homemade bread is homemade pizza. As an aside, one of my bread recipe sources is the Artisan Bread in 5 minutes book. I made a homemade pizza one night as an experiment and it turned out to be better than most pizzas I’ve eaten. As I got better at cooking the pizza, so too did the actual taste. Everyone who has tasted my pizza also tends to think highly of it. The aforementioned picky eating girlfriend is also very fond of my homemade pizza, so I get plenty of practice making it.
    The downside is that if I do indulge in shit food at some point (e.g. eating a McDonald’s burger or eating a rich desert) I can easily feel noticeably worse afterward. However, I think that’s more a case of not having lost all the weight from eating badly over the years and just needing to further improve my bodily system.
    I, personally, can’t follow any of the more extreme diets, especially the raw food diets. A video on YouTube showed a comparison of two high end blenders in relation to a Raw Food diet, which basically entails grinding up handfuls of greens and other uncooked vegetables into a thick, dark green soup. While I’m sure it’s healthy, it seems unpleasant to eat.
    I don’t follow any diet that is meant to be temporary. Once you leave a diet, the temptation to go back to earlier eating habits is too great. As such, I tend to shift my eating habits as far as I can while still feeling that it’s sustainable. It is, of course, trial an error. I’ve tried different things out and found things that do and do not work. For a few months, I brought baby carrots to work every day to the point where I can’t ever eat baby carrots anymore. Whereas, a hearty mixture of beans and vegetables has been pretty sustainable over the past month or two. We’ll see how that goes for me.

  2. Thanks for the killing field link. Got my morning going big-time (and the few seconds at the beginning made me smile, too.)

  3. John McPherson won’t get a chuckle out of me because he can’t even draw a groaner of a gag well enough to sell it. There was a time when he could cartoon halfway well, but he seems to have given up on even trying anymore.
    I’ve been an octo-lacto vegetarian for a few years now, and while I appreciate that it gives me a clear conscience, etc, I really appreciate that it’s almost entirely gotten me off eating fast food, which was a real vice of mine before I changed up my diet. Pizza is still a problem for me, but not nearly what it used to be since I also went on a low-carb diet to lose some weight.

  4. Been trying to improve my diet on a two-steps-forward-one-step-back basis (the latest BIG step backward involved the End of October Candy Binge), but it has been newly complicated by the latest food fad: The Paleo Diet, which many of my acquaintences – mostly online – have jumped bare feet first into. If you don’t know what Paleo is all about, I can’t explain it without spending the rest of the day writing this comment, just think “eat like a caveman who outlived a Neanderthal”.
    But what I really wanted to say is:
    One of my favorite truisms-disguised-as-a-joke these days is “You know what they call Alternative Medicine that is proven effective? Medicine.”

  5. As it happens, I’m watching my diet now and steadily taking off a few pounds at a time, mostly by eliminating true junk and then portioning the rest.
    But what Mat says (and Sean suggests) about paying for your sins rings true because in our veggie days, we lived across the street from a Burger Chef (a now departed franchise) and once or twice I snuck over there to scratch the itch. Big mistake. Ditto with “not being difficult” when visiting the folks.
    Your body really gets used to not having that stuff, which makes being on the road kind of a challenge. Accordingly, I’m hoping to carve off the weight without actually becoming healthy. But I had a Quarter Pounder(tm) while on the fly yesterday and it turned into a lead gut weight, so I may already have crossed the line.

  6. As for Traditional Medicine that works, an ex-girlfriend is now a nurse married to a doctor and they are into a couple of types of herbal things. She’s been to Africa to study Yorubal medicine and to Tibet for something else, and there’s an element of hippie voodoo in their deal but its mostly just old fashioned — very old fashioned — natural remedies. And it doesn’t involve parts of endangered species, so I’m cool with it, in large part because they both have enough standard training to know when things are going seriously off the track.
    And she always had a healthy sense of curiosity. When we dated, she was a freshman at college because her parents insisted she give liberal arts at least one year before going to nursing school, which was what she wanted. So she signed up for archaeology and ancient Greek and I forget what else — just whatever looked really interesting, since she knew it didn’t have to build into any kind of major anyway. Not all the people who work with herbs are airheads, or humorless.

  7. “You know what they call Alternative Medicine that is proven effective? Medicine.” Good line, makes a convincing point.
    “Don’t ask me what I think of traditional medicine, though. Ask a rhinoceros.” Bad line, leaves you wide open to comebacks like “Don’t ask me what I think of science. Ask a rhesus monkey.”

  9. “I think I can effectively argue the harm-to-rhinos over the harm-to-rhesus-monkeys if it comes up” I’m sure you can, I probably could too, but why invite that attack when there are so many ways to defend scientific medicine that don’t do so?

  10. Simple — it is unconscionable for people who generally claim to care about animals and to be aligned to the environment to support a medical system that results in such brutality and ecological horrors.
    “What about the rhesus monkeys?” is not an effective counterargument because (A) they’re not endangered and (B) you’re not as likely to be arguing with a vegetarian or ardent believer in free-range chickens and such.
    Plus, the use of animals for testing can be logically and rationally justified, while the slaughter of endangered rhinos for their horns cannot.
    But, fundamentally, I was less interested in defending scientific medicine than in pointing out a very troubling issue in folk medicine that I feel is not adequately addressed when people are being rapturous about the wisdom of the ages.
    As said, I’m good with acupuncture and some other non-traditional medicines, but I’ve got little patience with hippie voodoo or with people who don’t even try to determine where the line should be drawn. The reason I made the statement was not to defend science but to challenge bunk.

  11. Thanks to Sherwood for drawing attention to the Killing Field link.
    No disrespect to Jimi, but it made me go listen to Electric Flag — one of my all time favorites.

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