No doubt you have heard of the scandal involving lettuce this week.
Three Winter Haven residents went to the hospital Sunday after a food fight at a retirement home salad bar.
The facts, as outlined by police:
A 62-year-old put his hands in the lettuce. An 86-year-old objected. The younger man punched the elder and then bit a 79-year-old meddler. The 62-year-old's mother cut her arm intervening. Finally, a 92-year-old landed on the floor.
Granted, the incident raises a specter of lettuce-related health risks.
But consider that a far more dangerous food exists among us.
I speak, of course, of french fries.
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French fries are at the center of almost all evil.
Fries find trouble like tofu finds a wok.
It is no wonder that McDonald's announced plans this week to eliminate its 7-ounce Supersize fries - or that, in Texas, the agriculture commissioner issued an edict limiting elementary schoolchildren to 3 ounces of fries per week.
We, as a people, would be better off if everyone stuck to mashed potatoes.
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Item: In 1991, the owner of an Italian restaurant in Inverness was accused of assaulting a police officer with a 30-pound bag of fries.
Item: In 2001, a woman tried to smuggle heroin into the high-security Korydallos prison complex in Athens, Greece. The drug was stuffed into fries.
Item: In 2002, fries were implicated when a stove fire damaged a Punta Gorda apartment.
Are you seeing a pattern?
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Moreover, fries often associate with known felons.
On Death Row, fries are among food items most often requested by condemned inmates planning final meals.
French fries were at the heart of a Manhattan shooting in January 2003, after a wanna-be crook put a toy gun to the head of a fast food delivery man. The latter was an undercover cop, whose nearby partner had a real gun.
Last March, in Macon, Ga., a man was killed after he borrowed $2 for fries from a 12-year-old and then didn't pay her back. Police charged the man's uncle, suggesting that blood is not thicker than grease.
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Multiple choice. Social services took a Milwaukee woman's daughter in January 2002 after the woman shoplifted:
A) a Rolex watch?
B) an Eminem CD?
C) fries?
The correct answer, of course, is "C."
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Do we want fries in the schools at all?
They give teenagers zits.
They wind up stuck in noses.
Three years ago, a 8-year-old nearly choked on a fry at St. Petersburg's Bay Point Elementary Magnet School. Fortunately, another 8-year-old knew the Heimlich maneuver.
In the wrong hands, fries have been weaponized.
Consider the March 1998 case in which a Checkers manager was accused of crushing fries into an employee's hand. Or the apparent copycat, a May 2003 episode in which a Maryland woman reportedly rubbed fries on a boy who dripped ice cream on her shirt.
"Obviously, this was an overreaction," a police spokeswoman said.
Sigh.
So often the case with fries.
* * *
Isn't it time?
Shouldn't America finally pass Fry Control legislation?
Lawmakers flirted with it during post-9/11 anti-Franco furor. Congressional cafes stripped french fries from their menus, replacing them with freedom fries.
Washington, D.C., police tried to crack down by arresting a 12-year-old for eating fries on the subway.
But they can't do it alone.
Heinz, the ketchup maker, adopted a slogan not long ago: "Fourteen million french fries can't be wrong."
I think we all know better than that.
- Times news researcher John Martin contributed to this report. Tampa's Kennedy Boulevard was once called Grand Central. Now Grand Central is the name of a weekly column by Times senior editor Patty Ryan. Reach Patty Ryan at 226-3382 or pryan@sptimes.com
