Food
"If your stomach rumbles between meals, why not try licking some dried-onion-flavour soup granules - a great way to keep hunger at bay without packing on the pounds! The savour granules are sure to make your tastebuds tingle and keep you on the straight and narrow until dinnertime. And they hardly register on the calorie-ometer! Don't be put off by the strong smell and the killer aftertaste. Just suck 'em and see your excess baggage melt away."
It's for gems like this that I cherish the National Enquirer, "America's hottest weekly" and best-selling gossip sheet. In an increasingly gourmet world, it's a glaring example of just how crazy food advice can still be. The Enquirer is an almanac of weird elixirs and revolting low-fat concoctions, all written in the most upbeat tabloid style, and many of them featuring zingy onion soup granules, an ingredient you don't see much of these days. Want a party dish to impress your friends? Just whip some of these magical granules into zero-fat Philadelphia. Hey, presto! A creamy dip to serve with crudites.
The Enquirer is terrifyingly optimistic. On a weekly basis it promises eternal slimness and cures for incurable diseases with the dumbest diet tips. To lose 15lb in one week, try the swimsuit diet, featuring fat-free bologna sausage, raw cauliflower, Popsicles and "Brown Cow", a mixture of diet root beer and vanilla ice. Or how about the chocolate diet? Shed your "bubble butt" in just four days by snacking on chocolate Snackwells, chocolate-chip muffins, Oreo cookies and fat-free choco frozen yoghurt bars. Worried about cancer? Worry no more. Drink a glass of purple grape juice a day. Kills all known carcinogens.
These tips are shamelessly, brutally ephemeral. The very next week readers will be told that drinking fruit juice (especially grape, especially purple) will not only make you obese, it will also make your children's teeth fall out and cause them irrevocable social problems at school. And eating chocolate, so far from melting away the pounds, will give you unattractive love handles (illustrated with unflattering swimsuit shots of Oprah/Tom Hanks/assorted country and western stars) and ruin your marriage. So why not try broccoli instead? Or snack on fried chicken and home fries, like the gorgeous supermodel Tyra Banks (advice that will be reversed as soon as Tyra acquires a spare tyre).
The only fixed points in the Enquirer's food coverage are ads (for dayglo Spam sandwiches and Hormel canned chilli) and "Cookin' corner", which serves up bland recipes whose invariable ingredients are green bell peppers, chicken breast, "minced cilantro" (that's chopped coriander to us), and sunny-yellow Carolina rice. Finally, there's always a celebrity recipe, measured up for grams of fat and calories.
While other periodicals waste their time worrying about flavour and texture, or freshness and seasonality, the NE knows there are just two criteria that can possibly make food interesting: 1) will it make me fat? And 2) does it have a celebrity connection? And if it satisfies on the celebrity front, it doesn't matter how fattening it is, because it will still have the alluring taste of La-La land, no matter how washed-up the star. On a good week, the recipe is "Patrick Swayze's citrus squares". On a bad week (and there are many more bad weeks than good), it's steak Lorenzo flavoured with mouldy dried herbs, courtesy of "Magnum PI star Larry Manetti", a disgusting dish carefully colour co-ordinated to match the overtanned has-been.
So you don't even need those trusty onion soup granules to fight the battle of the bulge. The Enquirer kills hunger all by its delightful self.
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