Here in the verdant vale of Silicon (population: hippies) is the epicenter of the craze that has swept the nation in recent years: hippies.
By hippies, I mean two distinct things that are also sort of intertwined: health food and organic stuff. So strictly speaking, the health food is more to do with yuppies than hippies, but hippies is a funnier word so I shall use that as a blanket term for hippies, yuppies and other “-ies” who annoy me.
I feel ashamed of myself, in a way. I too have let the hippies into my mind. However, the joke’s ultimately on
them, because contrary to what
they want, my attitudes have actually changed to
favor non-organic foods. With every bite of a pesticide-laced apple, I taste the delectable tableau of flavors that is victory over the hippies.
Point is, I’ve let the hippies influence me, much to my chagrin. I’ve taken to purposely seeking out non-organic food. Making hippies cry isn’t the only purpose, though. Have you seen organic food? It’s got stuff
living in it, after it’s in the supermarket, where it should be darn well dead. One time I picked up an organic apple and a worm came out, sporting a beard and a tie-dye shirt, and offered me a hit of the tiny joint it was holding. How a worm managed to roll a joint without hands, I have no idea. Suffice it to say, that was the turning point for me.
Before I came west, though, I could escape the hippies. In the town where I live during the year, the hippie food offering of the local supermarket is limited to a single aisle. (A nearby branch of the same supermarket has fallen to the health food craze, but at least I have alternatives.) When I pass by that aisle, the scent of hippies isn’t even very strong. On good days, I could sometimes even manage to go through that aisle as a shortcut to the checkout lines, without spontaneously growing a ponytail. Life was good back east. A mostly hippie-free grocery store, a winning football team…you name it.
Here, no such luck. The hippies have even infiltrated my office. You can see them lounging around the hallways. There’s a new Healthy Snack Program, and you just know the hippies are behind it. Apparently this program was instituted mere weeks before I arrived, in a classic example of bad timing. The Healthy Snack Program involves removing all the candy that real people actually eat from at least one of the office buildings, and replacing said candy with a single, massive jar of birdseed.
I jest, of course. There are many jars, each containing a subtly different kind of birdseed. There are also some baskets containing paper-wrapped birdseed bars. On some days there’s even a big plate displaying artfully arranged slices of birdseed loaf. The point is, even under the Healthy Snack Program there’s no shortage of variety.
There’s icing on the cake, though. You eat all of your healthy snacks off Low-Footprint Dishware. You may think Low-Footprint Dishware is just paper plates, but if you thought that, you’d be sorely mistaken! These aren’t your regular, garden-variety paper plates. They are manufacturing using Sustainable Products, through an Environmentally Friendly Manufacturing Process. From what I can gather, they take garbage, squish it, blast it with superheated steam and pour it into plate-shaped molds. The resulting plates are durable, waterproof, microwave-safe, extremely resistant to heat, and biodegradable. I remain doubtful about the environmental impact of generating enough power to heat
concentrated garbage until you can
pour it, but what do I know.
That’s not all! You eat off your Low-Footprint Dishware with Spudware™. I have not found out the specifics of the Spudware manufacturing process, but the end result is cutlery that looks like plastic but is really
so much less than that. According to the Spudware promotional poster in the cafeteria, Spudware is 20% soybean oil and 80% compressed potatoes. I am not making this up. I have this image in my mind of a factory housing a single giant Dr. Seuss-like machine, with a big funnel on top for soybean oil and a conveyor belt for potatoes at one end, and a conveyor belt for cutlery at the other end. And what this machine does is compress potatoes and add a dash of soybean oil, and it does that
all day long. The result is surprisingly plastic-like, and it is durable, waterproof, microwave-safe, extremely resistant to heat, and biodegradable. I’m actually suspicious that Spudware is really just plastic, and the company that makes it concocted a very elaborate lie to mess with hippies’ minds.
Thankfully, my office building has not yet succumbed. Our kitchen has, like, Twinkies in it. We eat food off of plates that are shamelessly paper, with utensils that are shamelessly plastic. I suspect the other office building fell to the hippies because it’s way out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by hills and fields, where the hippies lurk. My office building has too much civilization around it. The hippies fear civilization.
Bottom line? I’m living in one of the last bastions of the old, trans-fatty, pesticide-soaked way. My only hope is that we hold out until I’m gone; it would be too painful if I had to stay here and watch the last of California be swept under the wave of hippies.
