Thinking The Lions: 1001 Ways To Tune Up The World: Number Fifty-Six

56. Process EVERYTHING.

Sweetie probably saw this one coming today.

Some ideas are the product of years of hard work, inventive thought, careful study, and diligence.

Other ideas come to you when you hear your wife say the words "Fish garbage."

This morning, on CNN, I saw a teaser for the story about the garbage floating in the ocean, garbage that's not just floating in the ocean but getting into the fish people love to eat/proclaim the health benefits of.

Then, I got to work and found a list of "Fifteen Foods You Don't Have To Buy Organic" promoted on MSN.

Of course, organic foods will also kill you.

You know what doesn't have poison in it? Doritos. Nobody has ever died from eating Doritos, a fact I looked up on the site "Statistics That Sound About Right."

Okay, to be fair, one thing has died from eating Doritos: The Deacon, a plant that was used by the UW football strength coach to make a very ill-conceived point about nutrition; the coach took two plants and fed one only plant food; the other -- The Deacon-- the coach fed Doritos, DiGiorno pizza, and Oreo cookies (a/k/a "my lunch this Friday"), and also whiskey and beer. Unsurprisingly, the plant died; very surprisingly, 54 UW football players took this as an instruction that they were to eat only plant food, resulting in nearly the entire team winding up hospitalized and needing chelation.

Just kidding! Chelation wouldn't be used to cure that.

Anyway, the point is: Doritos don't kill people, if eaten in moderation. Neither do Raisinets, which now come with "antioxidants."

While I've been anti-antioxidant in the past, all this fish garbage and poisoned spinach has made me rethink my position, and I am now firmly in favor of putting antioxidants, and oxidants, and everything else that's beneficial, into our food. What we should be doing is processing the bejeezus out of our food -- running it through every Rube Goldberg contraption we can think of, mashing out the bad and injecting the good, and then reshaping it into the form of the original food, only sans poison and plus the stuff we need.

Forget eating peanuts; instead, you can eat P-Nutz, which would be processed peanuts ground up into fine powder, coated with a dose of fish oil (good for the brain, and may help prevent deterioration of schizophrenia), then reshaped into a genuine-looking peanut in the shell -- and, as an added bonus, the shell would be edible.

And the benefits go beyond that. Everyone always wants me to eat broccoli even though broccoli, based upon proof provided by two separate TV shows, is clearly not intended for human consumption. People want me to eat broccoli for its claimed health benefits, which include vitamins, calcium, prevention of cataracts, heart disease and cancer, and, I assume, the ability to fly if I can just get away from the rays of the red sun I've been living under.

Here's my solution: Forget eating a foul-tasting leafy plant. Take all those things out of the broccoli, bake them into a Funyun, and have me eat that.

Problem solved -- and deliciously so.

Prior entries:

55. Make children's toys solar- or kinetic-powered.

54. Abandon the north.

53. Give in and have computers start remembering things for us.

52. Make cups and glasses wider on the bottom. (All cups and glasses.)

51. Sometimes easier is harder (and dumber.)