Sunday, November 29, 2015

Nanny-Stating At Its Finest

If, during your travels, you find yourself in Mexico City and you take your life and your colonic health in your hands and venture to a restaurant, you will witness some world-class nanny stating.
Notice the table, set with the finest flatware produced in the local barrios, hand forged from old car batteries. The lovely servilletas, cute little napkins that only yesterday afternoon were gently used toilet paper being pulled from the wastecans in the restaurant's baño and meticulously rinsed and reformed into quilted napkins. The candle is a mix of beef tallow and porcine earwax sourced from the local Carnicero, mixed with a bit of bathroom urinal cake to give a 'pleasant' scent (or at least mask the acrid notes of  death and decay wafting through the open sewers next to the kitchen). The shining silver-colored plates will leach chromium and arsenic into your meal as they are actually circular cut-outs from the shielding used in retired X-Ray equipment and old iron lung machines...

What is MISSING, however, is the salero, the venerable and ubiquitous salt shaker found on every table from New York City (where you can't have a Big Gulp, but you can have a pound of kosher salt on the table) to the lowliest ресторан in Yakutsk Siberia,
removed by government 'request' back in 2013, in order to help curb obesity and hypertension in Mexico.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/71SJto8%2BWlL._SY355_.jpg 

Want some salt to further cover up the taste of spoiled rat meat or waaaaay out of date processed poultry by-products that is skating around your slightly-radioactive plate in a thin sheen of pepper sauce and heavily used 10w40 motor oil? Ask your camarera for the salt, pantomiming by shaking your hand over your plate. She will either misinterpret the gesture as a request for a handjob and quickly call her mother or younger sister hoping to make a quick 160 pesos, or make a correct deduction and waddle off to get your salt shaker. She'll deliver it to the table and wait impatiently, foot-tapping and eye-rolling, for you to finish sprinkling crystalized death over you food, then snatch it back off the table and deliver it back to the cabinet where salt, the cook's heroin, and the dish-washing staff's crystal meth are stored under lock-and-key...




Guess what? 
Want to cut down on salt consumption? Quit using so damn much of it in absolutely everything that is prepared for public sale. Everything I've eaten has had 150+% of the usual RDA of sodium...
I'm a salt fiend - I've been known to add salt to my Salt & Vinegar potato chips...
The only time I've need a bit of the old NaCl here is when I got a pair of rather dubious-looking sunny-side up eggs for breakfast yesterday morning.
(These eggs were, I estimate, older than my socks, based on the condition of the yolks.

The fresher the egg, the 'higher' the yolks stand... The things were concave- higher around the edges of the yolk than the center. Awful. Just appalling.)
Nothing else I have had to eat needed salt- not the 'hamburger', not the al pastor. Even the michelada had a ton of salt in it, in addition to the salt-and-chili mix on the rim of the glass. 

Mauro's Michelada Supreme 
(Pic: Food Network)
(No Angry Orchard, Strongbow, Magners, MacKenzie's or anything else cider-like. A michelada is going completely the other direction though...Don't ask why. Seemed like a good idea at the time.)


So- where are we going with this?
So if the gummint decides something is bad for you (or the planet), and can request or mandate that it be removed from general access, where does it end?

New York knows. 
No large sodas. No styrofoam food containers.
No plastic bags.

How long before bacon goes away- the fatty, salty, smoky cured slice of death? 

How long until the outlawing of barbecue- because burned meat means carcinogens.
Will prohibition come back, when some SJW decides that the number of people killed by alcoholism and drinking-related activities (DUI, etc) is unacceptable?
Motorcycles - those seatbeltless rockets of death on two wheels - so much more dangerous than cars. Outlaw them!
Nanny is coming for everything you love.

Start hoarding the bacon now.

TBG - - ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒE

3 comments:

Luc said...

I guess the chances of that depends on how strong the corresponding lobby is no? I don't know how your meat producer or pork grower lobbies are called in Amuhrikah, but if it's anything like here, there's no chance in hell that bacon would ever be banned.

Old NFO said...

Austin is already trying to ban BBQ joints in the city... sigh

Mike said...

You're gonna put me off my feed, bro...
Not really, I've been to Old Mexico many times, and have the damaged GI tract to prove it.
I haven't been there lately, since you have to worry about getting kidnapped....by the Federales....
That's essentially what it is, state-sanctioned kidnapping for ransom if you get caught with so much as a bullet casing. You get tossed in a hole until someone pays your ransom....err fine...
No bail