It looks like the kid gloves, and the bibs, are coming off in New York City. The thing that advocates of good food have long feared is about to happen; New York City will be the first to ban trans fatty acids.

Know why McDonald’s fries tasted better when you were a kid? Trans fatty acids - and a lot of salt. Do they taste as good today? Of course not. The only people who think they taste just as good today hated them all along. It’s like people who eat veggie burgers telling you they’re just as good as beef. Or that Rocio Guario Diaz is just as good as Adriana Lima:

Well, maybe they have something there.

Now this isn’t a done deal yet. They’re going to hold a public hearing, blah, blah, blah. This is just a formality. People who want to eat trans fatty acids are going to be at a Burger King gorging themselves on Big Mac’s or whatever the hell they serve there so the only ones showing up for this hearing are crazy activists who pretty much exist to make the rest of us miserable. That means the ban is going through.

I believe in keeping power with the people so I walked outside and stopped some pedestrians and asked what they thought of the idea:

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Nothing says relaxation and down-home cooking like the smell of crackling electricity through chicken corpses and Liborio Markets, a Latino-based grocery store moving into the region, aims to please. To make sure you get the freshest chicken nuggets possible, they intend to kill about 150 chickens a day by coursing wholesome electrical currents through the feathered critters. Then they cook them. Seems simple enough, and about as humane as you can get, being they are turned into food and all, but some residents are clucking about it.

Claudia Barnes, a local busybody who learned just today that chickens have to die before she can eat them, doesn’t like the idea at all.

“We’re just appalled,” she said. “If they want to do this in the privacy of their home, I don’t care. But we’re just opening up a keg of worms if this happens.”

Keg of worms? What happened to cliches everyone knew and that made sense? She is worried about some kind of slippery slope here, like if chickens are killed humanely we’ll suddenly have dogs hanging in the streets, like in Spain? And they should kill chickens in their homes? Is that some kind of racist thing against Mexicans? Listen up, Claudia, Mexicans may have chickens fight each other in their basements but they don’t kill them. Not on purpose anyway. I am with the Mexicans here. I am okay with dead chickens because they can’t bring me my slippers but I draw the line at hanging dogs.

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“Most people would say if this was anywhere but Marin, people would just shoot him,” Dixie Goldsby said about the rodent that hopped into her Honda Insight in Utah and came back to California with her.

Goldsby is factually incorrect but it doesn’t matter if you’re a Marin resident. Being haughty is what counts. John Kerry will likely get 95% of the vote there. What she doesn’t realize, and most Americans do, is that no one would have bothered to shoot the little critter.

1) Any decent size bullet would obliterate the chipmunk so there would be no way to make a big trophy out of him and put him in the den with the lions and tigers and bears we all have mounted. Marin County people tell their kids scary bedtime stories about the rest of America and they all invariably involve evil people shooting helpless animals while driving SUVs that use all gasoline … and smoking cigarettes in public bars.

2) There’s not much meat on chipmunks … for the $.65 I would waste on a shell I could get three times as much meat in a McDonald’s hamburger.

No, most Marin County voters actually believe that in other places the little thing would be dead. The most telling way you know it’s Marin County? They want to fly the little guy back to Utah … on a private plane … and they want someone else to pay for it.

The chipmunk could not be released in Marin legally or ethically because he is not native and because ecosystem balance is important, according to Melanie Piazza, director of animal care for WildCare: Terwilliger Nature Education and Wildlife Rehabilitation. The trip will require more than $300 for gas, along with food and overnight lodging for the humans. WildCare is hoping animal lovers will donate money to help pay for the mission. Piazza did not mention what wasting all of that gas and electricity would do for ‘ecosystem balance.’

“If we couldn’t get him back he’d be euthanized, so I did have an investment in getting him back,” said Goldsby, a clinical lab scientist.

Huh??? Who was going to euthanize the little guy? Someone in Marin County? Or would they drive him east for that nasty job?
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