The Weekly Shriek -- Home Grown or Alien
I'm in the mood for a nice big salad, I said as we squeezed into a booth at Bob Evans the other evening.
"Boy, you are brave," my husband Johnny teased. "Not worried about the e-coli outbreak?"
"What's the deal with all of our veggies going bad?" my friend, Anna Marie, mused as she perused the menu. "I don't remember so many food problems in years past."
"Wild hogs peed on the spinach last summer," Johnny informed us.
"Wild hogs?" I had a hard time accepting that Babe or Miss Piggy would be so crass, but perhaps some of their ill-mannered cousins had done the dirty deed.
"Now it's the green onions at Taco Bell," Anna Marie continued.
"It was lettuce at Taco Bell," I jumped in, visualizing a bunch of rowdy pigs breaking through a fence to do their business in a lettuce patch.
"No, no. It was lettuce at the Olive Garden," Johnny corrected us both. "It was green onions at ChiChis."
"So what was Taco Bell?"
"Not sure they know yet," he said.
"Maybe it was terrorists," Anna Marie closed her menu and laid it down on the table.
"Osama Bin Laden peed in the spinach?" I knew he had a bad attitude but I had no idea he might take out his ideological resentments on a field of greens.
"Well, why not?" she said. "Someone sent anthrax to Tom Brokaw."
"I didn't know that was Osama Bin Laden - and besides, sending dread diseases through the Postal Service is different from urinating on diet food."
"Can I help you?" The waitress pretended that she hadn't heard our conversation.
"I think I'll have chili." I avoided Anna Marie's eyes.
"I believe Osama's tastes run toward the more spectacular," Johnny said after we ordered. "Besides, he could hire all the livestock he wants if urination terror was his thing."
He had a point. "I'm not sure that Bin Laden's religion of choice supports swine warfare," I agreed.
"Maybe he hires aliens to do it for him?" Anna Marie wondered.
I grabbed her wrist. "That must be what Lou Dobbs is always talking about!"
"Lou Dobbs talks about terrorists peeing on our vegetables?"
"No, he's always talking about our porous borders - and aliens." I glanced at Johnny and smirked.
He perked up. "You mean the ones in the shiny space suits that come in peace?"
"The problem is in telling the difference between the friendly ones and the other kind," I prompted.
"He just said that the friendly ones wear shiny space suits," Anna Marie laughed. "So the ones without a space suit are agricultural terrorists with bladder problems and a herd of hogs?"
"Or maybe they are just pig farmers looking to move somewhere they can sell their bacon for a few cents more." I studied my hands, suddenly embarrassed by how serious our jokes had become.
"Then how do you know?" Anna Marie asked.
"That's easy," Johnny said as he prepared the trap. "The friendly ones know the password."
"What's the password?" she bit.
Johnny grinned.
Here he goes, I snickered to myself.
"Klaatu barada nikto."
"Oh, of course." She rolled her eyes and struggled to make the double fingered peace sign made popular by Mr. Spock in the earliest Star Trek programs.
I wondered if anyone younger than us remembered The Day the Earth Stood Still or Star Trek, back when it was filmed in black and white. I wondered if Lou Dobbs did. "So maybe that's the solution to Lou Dobbs' quandary," I said. "We give the legal aliens a password and make them promise not to share it with the illegal ones."
"Oh yeah," Anna Marie snorted. "That ought to work."
"Just how serious is this problem?" Johnny asked. "Are the unfriendly aliens who don't know the password peeing across the borders onto our lettuce?"
I shrugged. "Do we even grow lettuce that close to the border?"
"Does e-coli really come from the bad habits of wild hogs?" Anna Marie sipped her iced tea.
The three of us sat back in our seats, pondering these heavy issues.
"They have DNA now."
Johnny and Anna Marie looked at me in surprise.
"DNA?" Anna Marie blinked twice.
"You know, they can tell which version of e-coli is making folks sick at any given time," I said. "They can identify it by its DNA."
Anna Marie glanced across the table at Johnny. "So you are telling me that if Osama Bin Laden's been at our vegetables, we can just take a DNA sample of our salads to homeland security and they'll do a few tests and we'll know?"
"Well, that's presuming that all this vegetable drama comes from pigs or alien terrorists or regular old Americans who leave frozen fingers in the chili to extort a few bucks from the restaurant," Johnny said as the waitress served us.
Horrified, I stared into my chili and poked it tentatively with my spoon.