Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
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.
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.
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?
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.
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."
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