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From the late great Lewis Grizzard...

It’s unwise to try to stand between a true southerner and his beef. Lewis was no fan of activist seeking to substitute other products for beef. One can only wonder what kind of gems he’d have for the PETA crowd today…

Here’s The Beef

In protest for what I consider to be recent unfair attacks on beef, one of my favorite meats, I went out and had myself a thick, juicy T-bone at Long Horn Steaks the other night.

It was great, as usual. I would have eaten two if my stomach would have held another because we beefeaters need to do all we can to tell the wimps and weenies who have put themselves in charge of our lifestyles to go eat a bucket of worms (a.k.a. sushi).

It’s cow meat they’re after now. One group says we’re being cruel by killing cows and chopping them into steaks.

There’s a book out about the evils, both social and physical, of eating beef as well. I refuse to name it here and give it any publicity.

And then, I read a story in the papers about a report from the American Chemical Society saying the natural substance that gives beef its meaty taste has been synthesized in the laboratory and may be used to turn tofu into a substitute for beef.

Do what?

I asked a health nut to tell me what tofu is. It sounds to me like a ballet dance step.

“It’s soybean-based,” she explained.

So let me see if I have this straight.

Some scientist has come up with something in his lab to put in something made out of soybeans, and I’m supposed to eat that instead of beef?

The magic ingredient is BMP. Said the article, “BMP could be used to make imitation beef with little or no saturated fat similar to the way fake crab meat is made.”

Fake crab meat? What’s going on here?

In the first place, I once ate a soybean burger. Another friend of mine, also a health nut, said, “Try this, you might like it.”

Somebody once said the same thing to me about marriage.

The soybean burger was awful, so I went to Wendy’s and got myself a double with cheese to get the taste out of my mouth.

In the second place, when are those self-appointed jerks going to stop jacking us around about our food?

Remember when you were growing up how important it was to eat eggs? “Eat the rest of those eggs, young man,” my mother would say, “so you’ll grow up big and strong.”

Not anymore. Now they say eggs cause diphtheria, not to mention shortness and weakness, so somebody has come out with a fake egg.

I bet a chicken could tell the difference.

Pork has been put down as unhealthy. Some chickens have tumors in them and fish have mercury, and I never knew there was such a thing as fake crab meat until now.

So what’s left to eat? Nothing much. If what we read and hear is true, we’d all be better off if we didn’t eat anything at all, never had sex, abstained from drinking, smoking and gambling, and died on the operating table instead of getting a blood transfusion that could give us AIDS.

Life used to be fun. Now, it’s just one big Don’t.

But I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to continue to eat beef and everything else I like. I will never walk into a Long Horn and say, “I’ll have the tofu T-bone, please.”

If doing such a thing kills me, it’ll just have to kill me.

I think I’d rather go suddenly from a beef overdose than live long enough to get really sick and wind up croaking in a hospital bed where they’ve been keeping me alive by feeding me through a tube.

There should be the basic right to live free from as much worry as possible. But how can you, when not a day passes that we aren’t told what’s the latest thing that’s bad for us?

Eat, drink and be merry, I say, for tomorrow you may choke on a big piece of broccoli.