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Nostalgia September 2016

What You Don’t Know Won’t Hurt You

By Raymond Reid

When it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go,” I remember her saying. Her time to go was a couple of weeks before her 90th birthday. Can’t swear to it, but her last meal was probably bacon and eggs.

A recent Time magazine cover features two slices of bacon crossing each other to form an X.  Above the table of contents was a photo of two hot dogs. (Rest assured the advertisers did not include Hormel and Oscar Mayer.)

This issue warned about the danger of eating red meat such as beef and pork and processed meats, like hot dogs. These products contain carcinogens, the cover story began, which can cause cancer.

That’s when I stopped reading and put the magazine back on the shelf. “What you don’t know won’t hurt you,” my mother said many times. Evidently, she didn't know that red meat and hot dogs could kill you. And she probably wouldn’t have cared.

When it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go,” I remember her saying. Her time to go was a couple of weeks before her 90th birthday. Can’t swear to it, but her last meal was probably bacon and eggs.

There was often red meat on the Reid supper table. Every year, Dad bought half a cow and loaded it into our big freezer. I always asked him which half he bought, which he never found funny.

Besides beef, we had all the pork we could eat. We raised a couple of pigs every year, and although I “slopped” them every night, we never became close. I knew they were going to be shot dead in November. The odds of that not happening were about the same as pigs flying.

When we didn’t have beef or pork for supper, we had chicken. We raised those, too. A whole coop full. We raised “free-range” chickens before it was fashionable. I remember how stupid I thought they were. They had tiny little heads so they had to have tiny little brains. But they wouldn’t have heads for long. Mother would soon chop them off with an ax.

On the same night of the ax murder, we ate the chicken. How fresh can it get? It was always fried, too. Mother baked turkeys, but never chicken. It was always fried, except when she made chicken and dumplings.

As for hot dogs, I’ve eaten more than my share. Sometimes they’re all beef and sometimes they’re made of who knows what.

Which makes me wonder: If hot dogs contain carcinogens, wonder what happened to Matt Stonie, who won the 2015 Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest by eating 62 hot dogs in 10 minutes? My guess is he’s training for the 2016 contest.

If I knew more about my DNA and what it reveals about my traits and ancestry, I would better know what and what not to eat and drink.

Now I can, thanks to 23andme, who will explore my 23 pairs of chromosomes and tell me everything I need to know about my genetic makeup. All I have to do is spit in their saliva tube and mail to their lab, prepaid.

The price? $199. No thanks.

Instead, I will live by my mother’s adage, ‘What you don't know won’t hurt you.”

Plus, $199 will buy a lot of red meat, pork and hot dogs!

 

Raymond Reid is an author, free-lance writer and national award-winning humor columnist. He lives in Kernersville, N.C, and also has won several journalism awards from the N. C. Press Association. Contact him at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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