I AM THE FORCE

You people need to start enjoying life more. The anti-fat zealots have convinced all of you to drink skim milk and never eat desserts, cookies or rich, creamy butter again. I won't even get into the issue of how may of you won't even consider making rommegrot part of your regular diet. You're all letting "the man" bring you down. Please rethink this dogma!

Tasting good doesn't make something automatically bad for you. And eating a couple of brownies or a Krispy Kreme donut is not going to kill you. And even if life expectancy is actually reduced by this behavior, would you rather live 74 years with pleasure in your life, or 75 years without anything good to eat? You should avoid bad fat things like McDonald's, but that's no reason to deny yourself one of the fundamental pleasures of life.

Let's talk about butter for a moment. If you make peanut butter toast, it tastes much better to butter the toast before adding the peanut butter. If you have a muffin, it is infinitely tastier cut in half and slathered with butter. If you make a buttermilk biscuit, it tastes oh so much better covered with both real butter and gravy. So, why aren't you people following my lead? Take out butter from everything I just described and the experience will become very lackluster. Without the aggressive use of butter, your life pleasure quotient is reduced significantly.

On to the science for a moment. Studies seem to be coming out every day that low-fat diets do nothing to decrease your risks of cancer, heart disease or other bad things that can happen to you. So there, take that! Not to mention, that anti-cholesterol and other magical pills are now available to make the bad stuff go away. Cholesterol at 310? Just start taking Zocor and you'll be down to 180 in no time, all without ever having to change your diet. It's all mostly genetic anyway, as my low-fat eating, regular-exercising, high-cholesterol siblings have proven.

Think of this for a moment: you spend 30, 40, or 50 years of your life struggling daily to support the food police and remove all portions of fat, taste, or pleasure from your diet. Rice cakes, bran muffins, and garden salads. After all those years of self-denial, a study is probably going to come out that proves once and for all that comfort foods are good for you. The butter and cream you denied yourself, all actually very good for you. The foie gras you never tried, proven to be very beneficial. Breyers vanilla ice cream, both good and good for you. How will that make you feel?

This is, in fact, a very simple issue. It's all about how you want to live your life, and whether you want pleasure and satisfaction to be a significant part of the picture. You are scaring yourselves out of a pleasurable life, and it makes me sad for you. How can you keep saying no thanks to the creme brulee?

Just think of the infinite number of good experiences that you're missing on an every day basis. Cherry pie a la mode. Peanut butter cookies. Homemade ice cream. Beef stroganoff. Toblerone. Gelato. Fresh buttered bread right out of the oven. Chocolate eclairs. Chocolate malts. Cream and sugar on blackberries. Chocolate souffle. Coq au vin. Chicken and baking powder biscuits. French toast with butter, jam, syrup, bacon, sausage and ice cold 2% milk. Banana cream pie with meringue topping. Crepes with butter, jam, and powdered sugar. To name just a few.

I'm not arguing for you to turn yourself into a fat person. But if that starts to become a problem, I have no objection to you engaging in some kind of physical activity to lose the weight. Apparently, that is now as easy as walking around your block a couple times a day. Have an eclair and take the walk. Or don't take the walk, it will be fine either way. Also remember, that when you're young and in the dating world it's very difficult to gain weight. But when you get older and weight-gain becomes more likely, you should have found your life partner by that time and therefore should have less of a need to stay completely fit and trim. So, you can eat great food whether you're young or old. Isn't that exciting?

Think about making a change, and start living a pleasurable life today. Be assured that I'll keep the recipes coming as long as I'm able.