O, marvelous mind of man, what lunacies will you not dream up?

For the fat headed fat conscious members of our loony bin, the profiteers have come up with a new product. If I have the name straight, it is called Olean (pronounced oh-leen). It is a frying liquid which means that it should be an oil of some sort. It is advertised as non-fat although I would be inclined to believe that they meant non-caloric. Terms, and words, simply have little precise use today as they are stretched to fit whatever our masters have in mind at the time. Try and get someone to define "hate," for an exercise in wheel spinning.

Edible oils are today called fats mainly due to the fact that both, when used as fuel food, supply 9 kilo-calories of heat energy to the body. There is no precise definition for an oil other than it is a liquid, viscous, combustible, not soluble in water, slippery, and usually with a linear carbon/hydrogen atom linkage. (Oleic acid is known commercially as "red oil.") Fats are a sort of "solid oil" at room temperature. Thus, we find such things as fish fat and fish oil depending upon the critter and how many ice cubes it swims among.

Oils are animal, vegetable, mineral (mined; such as your auto's engine oil) and synthetic. Olean is probably a synthetic oil, or a derivative of something organic, developed with the following attributes: little taste, non-poisonous, of no value as a body fuel, and above all -- cheap. (Perhaps the "ole" comes from olein which is an animal and plant fat/oil.) These properties are filled by any drug store variety U.S.P. mineral oil which is often used as a laxative in small doses, or a cathartic, if you get carried away with its refreshing taste. I have never fried potatoes in mineral oil and someday I shall -- simply because my inquiring mind wants to know. I'll taste one such fried spud sprinkled with salt and, more than likely, will instantly recognize that it's a long way from potatoes fried in lard. You must give the marketing gurus credit for their efforts to concoct "designer foods." It's all part of a long term effort to make Homo sapiens (the "sap" part is right on!) independent of plants and animals for food. This of course will become a future necessity as talking apes replace everything from owls to elephants and for living and crapping space, the trees and bushes, until nothing remains but bumper to bumper bipeds waiting in line at their local synthetic food supplier for their daily ration of energized polystyrene which will enable them to return, fully charged, to their fondest pleasure -- screwing everything within sight and hearing. We are quite a way down this road already. We have masses of asses who firmly believe that if you add vitamins to horse manure, you'll have something "healthy" to eat. With a planet so stuffed with down-bred creatures, those desiring "natural" food will have no recourse except cannibalism. Perhaps an adjunct to the plastic food industry would be a sort of Soylent Green enterprise. (The dead were processed into vitamin enriched health bars in the movie of the same name.)

Olean was probably subjected to the usual laboratory exercises before it was made available for the suckers. One can only guess how many hapless critters died a horrible death so that a loving, and benevolent, humanity could benefit -- all in the name of righteous profit. This is how it goes:

A Chinese company develops a non-ionic detergent from the corpses of its latest "ethnic attenuation," and calls it Shid, probably because it rhymes with two well-known entities. It is axiomatic that there exists at least one shid-head out there who will try and eat the stuff, instead of washing his car with it. A sensible approach would be to select some "volunteers" from Attica or Leavenworth, and let them eat it with the results appropriately displayed on the Internet for instant down-loading. What really happens is that they corral a large batch of innocent critters, usually white rats. Real rats apparently have something in common with human rats. As in all science, only one variable is used in order to determine its effect. At least, that's what the nitwits believe. That everything on this planet is inter-related, is a fact that scientific wisdom hasn't reached as yet. (The emulsifying effect of ammonium stearate, for example, depends upon the oil/water ratio and the "free" ammonia molecules. One remembers from his chemistry that "ammonia water" contains ammonium ions, ammonia molecules and ammonium hydroxide molecules, all in various stages of hydration.) Anyway, the rats are inter-bred to such a high degree that they are virtually all "twins." Next, they are fed identical diets with the percentage of Shid gradually increased. Sooner or later, some will start dying. If it takes 1 gram of Shid, per 100 grams of rat, in the daily meal, to kill 25 percent of the rats, then this level is said to be the LD25. After thousands of such rats die horribly, the company then prepares its data sheet which is supplied as important technical information -- possibly for the literate rats interested in cleaning their garage floors.

An LD50 is perhaps the most widely used number. It represents the concentration which will kill 50 percent of the rats who eat it. How this relates to humans, is anyone's guess. No normal rat would eat the stuff unless it were starving but then again, most experimental animals are. Only the "in God's image" critters would do so -- which tells one much about that god.

One thing has always perplexed me: If the rats are bred in such a fashion as to render them almost clones, then why did only 50 percent die? Shouldn't it be an all or nothing at all Cole Porter scenario? What was it about the 50 percent who lived that was different from the 50 percent which died? (Some may have been closet Baptists!) It appears that, even with a total beehive equality, some are still more equal than others.

As for Olean, I might just buy some to see how effective it is for water-proofing saddles. Otherwise I'll go along with Chief Dan George who said in the Clint Eastwood movie Josie Wales, "You eat it."

Robert Frenz

14 March 1998