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[Bill Jones <billj AT harborside.com>]

My poor mom died of cancer at age 55.  Multiple myeloma is when you have 
cancer of the bone marrow all over your body.  I was only 15.  She 
actually said to me one day, as she lay there, "Billy, you've got to 
find out what it is we're eating that caused this.  It's got to be 
something."

This diet may sound familiar to you folks.  The morning started 
invariably with box cereal, the highest known source of carcinogenic 
acrilamide.  Lunch was usually peanut butter, maybe the second highest 
source.  Dinner was an opportunity to eat some really lovely browned 
foods, like maybe hamburger steak with a dark veneer of nitrosamines.  
Mom kept a deep fryer going under the sink (not on all the time, of 
course).  We didn't know; that's why her cooking was so good.  Two 
favorite acccompaniments for dinner were Rice-A-Roni, where the rice and 
noodle pieces are thoroughly browned in margarine, and a tiny portion of 
some frozen cole crop, bathed liberally in carcinogenic browned margarine.

I'd bet that besides skin cancer and lung cancer, which usually have 
other obvious causes, the epidemic of browning is at the heart of most 
cancer etiology.
Now, one way to make people like mom pay for the extra health care 
dollars they'll be sucking up some day, since we can't put a pork rind 
monitor on their chin, would be to have Devil's Advocates whose job is 
to snap photos of people eating smoked octopus or such, and then send 
the photos to the insurance provider, who can then cancel on their 
insurance.  Maybe that's a little too severe, so how about just having 
reports sent to a central government agency each time you purchase a 
doughnut.  It could be just like rationing during WWII.  Deep frying 
rarely occurs at home these days, so that's almost feasible.  I can only 
dream of the day when everyone's behavior will be controlled exactly as 
I demand.  :-)

Of course, my fascist demands that everyone become enlightened to the 
same extent that I am, and scrupulously avoid all the foods I've 
condemned, probably has more to do with my desire to control others, 
than it does with any feigned concern for the price of health insurance 
or the evils of socialism.

Bill