Neighbors scoffed when I threw lettuce on the grill, but high heat is best for protecting you from your leafy greens of choice — or so I’m told.
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These are tough times for food, starting with the Great Cyclospora Explosion of 2026. There’s also the Pillsbury Doughboy, reeling from the recall of nearly 736,000 bread rolls due to possible glass contamination.
There’s the nearly 1.6 million dozen eggs, which may be sporting bits of salmonella enteritidis.
There’s the crow that reporters were forced to choke down at the White House Correspondents Dinner.
There’s also the rumored Olive Garden identification cards; pasta passports that U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise compared to IDs that are already required to vote, but in his mind aren’t already required to vote and so a law must be passed.
This kind of mental confusion strongly correlates with low blood sugar, requiring a snack. But Scalise left proof of citizenship at home, so no breadsticks for him.
Then there’s the bacon.
Unlike your average traveler who speaks with an accent, 12,036 pounds of smoked Canadian bacon managed to cross the border into the U.S. without being stopped, inspected and body slammed.
Who knows what it was carrying? Given chilly relations between Washington and our northern neighbor, pork weaponization could not be ruled out. But it’s Canada, land of the agreeably mild, so the breakfast strips probably weren’t intended to go all cyclospora on us.
Probably.
It’s all a good reminder: Mother Nature is always trying to kill you.
And if Mom should miss, RFK Jr. is here to help.
Him and Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, the pilot fish to Junior’s shark, trailing happily in his wake on all things medically deranged
This month, Ladapo hopped aboard Junior’s anti-psychiatric meds bandwagon. This is unfortunate, given how many millions the shark and the little fish make sad.
But RFK Jr. doesn’t just take away. He gives. Such a giver. He wants to give us a cure-all worthy of Dr. Mehmet Oz’s “magic weight loss” coffee bean extract cure, only without the congressional hearing or the false advertising lawsuit.
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Of course, now Oz is administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the guy who hired him has miracle cures of his own: peptides.
“Big fan!” Junior told podcaster Joe Rogan, the preferred outlet for announcing medical policy, scientific breakthroughs and the next new thing Mother Nature has in store.
Not Ozempic peptides, with their years of safety studies. No, he’s going for the wild west peptides; those barely studied and “aggressively suppressed” amino acid chains that if not wonder drugs, are wondrous in his eyes.
And who am I to argue?
He’s tan, and he knows things. And there’s a peptide for that.
It seems suntanners heeding advice to stay out of cancer-inducing sunbeams — nature again — are sticking hypos loaded with “Barbie Peptide” into their arms to get their glow on.
“Bro science,” Dr. Michael Christopher, Tucson dermatologist and all-around melanoma hunter, said of influencers hawking alpha-melanocyte stimulating hormone.
However, the more appropriate name is not Barbie Peptide. It’s AlphaAsh, reflecting the unfortunate side effect of turning humans dull gray.
Never mind. Amino acid aficionados found peptide information on the internet, so it must be true. China is doing most of the chemical manufacturing for U.S. consumption, so it must be safe. After all, would China lead us astray? Fentanyl-smuggling China? That China? You feel comfy needling up with Xi Jinping’s chemistry set, right?
I refer you to the (maybe) locked and loaded Canadian bacon. Which my BLT is sorely missing.
Because when you take away the smoky strips, the lightly glassed Pillsbury buns and the grilled lettuce, which did not turn out as well as hoped, all you have left is this summer’s new American meal: a tomato and a memory.
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Pat Beall is a Sun Sentinel columnist and editorial writer.