Do not attempt to stuff whole eggplant in your ears. Do not sleep naked on the sidewalk.
Nobody in their right mind would pay somebody for that kind of advice. That is why government has to use taxpayer dollars to provide it. It creates indispensable jobs, you know.
No. I am not being silly. At tonight’s meeting of the Buncombe County Commissioners, Gibby Harris, the county’s health director, explained the need for education in programming to defat the tax base. What began as a program intended to combat obesity itself became obese from a bad case of mission creep. I commend Harris for taking a good tack in accepting an assignment from the county to step out of traditional government bounds and responding with suggestions for passive programming rather than recommending something more akin to mandatory liposuction.
Anyway, when asked if Safe Streets to School merely laid sidewalk, Harris replied, “We can put sidewalks down, but we need education because we have to teach people why they should use them.” Speaking of the need for cooking programs offered by the Cooperative Extension, she said one could give somebody an eggplant, but that didn’t mean they would know what to do with it. Perhaps she meant the destitute and famished might not know how to buy the right red wine and hand-pressed olive oil for aubergine parmigiana – or how to place the rosemary sprigs appropriately on the plate.
I do not wish to make Harris an offender for a word; rather, I am irate that the “un-Socialist” commissioners are so into controlling food. Chair David Gantt brought up the fact that old farmers want to quit farming to turn a profit on their tax liability – er real estate – and their kids want to move on to something with better earning potential. This followed talk about how more food needs to be availed through government subsidy.
In the old days, before all the geniuses started controlling food, the farmers could set prices to make their work rewarding. Now that a few geniuses on the Food Policy Council have a corner on the market of knowing how to grow and market food, they are making amazing new discoveries such as: (1) producers cannot afford to take food to farmers’ markets where people aren’t showing up to buy anything, and (2) if there are too many farmers’ markets, producers will be spread too thin to justify transportation costs for connecting with breakeven numbers of consumers.
