SOME time in the early eighties mom read in Huisgenoot that microwaved food will eventually cause children’s brains to turn into gooey, fluorescent yellow toxic waste.
Our smart General Electric oven with the faux-wood cover was subsequently given to the maid, who was over the moon with her gift because theses appliances were the latest trend and therefore expensive.
That the inside of her head and those of her seven children might end up looking like the aftermath of Hiroshima, didn’t seem to be much of an issue.
Not long after that mom read another article in Huisgenoot about the possible links between take-away food and cancer.
That was also the end of our regular Saturday outings to the Flying Saucer roadhouse.
Magazines, those days, were full of that type of speculative stories which, of course, were absolute rubbish, and caused families to suffer at the hands of naïve, bored housewives.
Salami or Bostick?
I honestly thought that kind of nonsense was a thing of the past, but recently listened to a talk show on the radio which suggested there are still so called ‘experts’ out there who get paid to feed us hogwash.
In an interview, a person with a masters degree explained how, after doing intense research, she found that children who accompany their parents on overseas holidays are far more likely to make a success of their lives, compared to those who don’t get to go skiing in the Alps twice every season.
Perhaps her brain got fried by a microwave oven as a child, I thought to myself while listening to her explaining how she came to the conclusion of her thesis.
She was right, of course, but what she established through hundreds of interviews and compiling stacks of spreadsheets, I could have explained to her over the phone in two minutes.
It’s common sense, my dear, that little Archie Mountbatten-Windsor will turn out to be more successful than little Arnoldus Venter from Daspoort.
Because, while Archie’s only worry in life will be whether to take salami or ham sandwiches to Eton College, poor
Arnie has to choose between using the last bit of Bostick to fix his five-sizes-too-small school shoes or to sniff it to ease the pain in his feet.
Empty heads
Perhaps microwave ovens do fry brains because people seem to be a lot dumber than they used to be.
It will explain why people with the intellectual capacity of a near empty bog roll are chosen to run complex operations such as Eskom, or are put in charge of the IT department at SARS.
They are all around us – the stupid ones – doing things not even Huisgenoot can explain, and because of their idiocy we are all suffering.
So, I don’t know whether mom’s action of having given our microwave away was a blessing or a curse, because if my brain was also dead I would not be worried that we might soon be buggered.
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