California Outlaws French Fries

by Liz Nevis

 

California “Governator” Arnold Schwarzenegger has approved a bill[1] that would make preparation, sale, possession, or consumption of French fries a felony punishable by a $10,000 fine, 3 years in prison, or both.  “Grease belongs on the outside of beautiful muscley bodies, not inside of ugly flabby ones,” the Governator announced.[2]

 

Ann O’Rexia, chief of the state Diet Police, hails the new law as an affirming empowerment that will help her department self-actualize.  “I’ve been telling the state legislature for years that secondhand calories hurt everyone,” she declared, “and they finally read my ribs.”

 

French fries are particularly insidious, O’Rexia says, because they smell good and crunch loudly, presenting irresistible temptation to passersby to forego their noble intentions to order only a few sporkfuls of wilted lettuce and succumb to the depravity themselves, setting off a chain reaction affecting everyone near them.  Some fast-food chains were even using clowns and other cartoon figures to openly market French fries to children, cementing habits early that would lead to dreadful-looking prom pictures and worse. 

 

Before the new law, the Diet Police’s only weapons against recreational eaters were guilt and shame. “Our undercover plainclothes officers would approach anyone eating French fries in public and say things like ‘Are you sure YOU need to eat that?’” O’Rexia recalled.  “Most of the burp-etrators would cringe and throw the food away, but sometimes they’d get really angry.  The Silicon Valley was probably the toughest beat, at two and three in the morning when the software programmers would venture out to munch.  Many of my people were severely beaten with first-edition graphic novels still in their original wrappers, and one had to have a pewter ‘Lord of the Rings’ figure surgically removed from her nostril. It was shaped like a dwarf brandishing an axe.  That had to hurt!”

 

Diet Police officers will now tail suspects home from stores that sell cooking oil and “deep-frying paraphernalia,” and the agricultural inspection stations at the state borders will employ fry-sniffing dogs to block the importation of contraband items.

 

But isn’t it true that when French fries are outlawed, only outlaws will have French fries?

 

“Yes,” says O’Rexia, “and that’s another benefit.  Criminals will become easy to identify because they will be fat and pimply.  We’ll put them all in prison, a perennial haven of fitness culture, and keep them from visually polluting our beaches.  That’s the kind of pollution we Californians need to worry about most.  Sure, we get a little bit of raw sewage washing out of our drains during winter flood season, but most of that doesn’t even show up on a TV camera.”

 

The new law passed by virtue of some unexpected support from California’s cigar-puffing, endangered-species-wearing, trophy-marrying right wing.  “France deserves this,” explained Prof. Atlas Schrug, Jingo Chair of International Economics at Stanford’s Hoover Institute.  “They wouldn’t help us protect our oil in Iraq, so we won’t fry in their oil in California.”

 

Donuts are next on Chief O’Rexia’s criminalization agenda, but she expects a wide, jiggly wall of opposition from other state and local police forces.  “I mean, look at some of those persons,” she complains.  “You can’t blame ALL that chunkiness on the bullet-proof vests.”

 

In the meantime, though, the characteristic greeting of California’s thousands of liberal-arts graduates is changing to “You want steamed tofu with that?”


[1] This is just a joke.  He didn’t really.

[2] See supra note 1.