(E) Die wahre Geschichte hinter der belgischen Coca-Cola

Credits: Daniel Glick dg371@nyu.edu

>>> Alright--who threw the cream pie at Jim?
>> Nils! Those.. BELGIANS have a history of pie tossing.
> That could be dangerous these days...Belgian dairy products are poison,
> man. Even their Coke isn't up to snuff.[1]

"This Would Be Funny If It Wasn't Real" a short essay by Me.

Once upon a time, a greedy animal-food-company exec saw a neat opportunity to make some easy cash. Buy some recycled fat, perhaps not exactly as clean as it should be, but who cares, for a low price. This fat was then processed into animal food and fed to a couple of millions of chickens (and some pigs). Some of these chickens (and pigs) died.

Farmers scratched their heads and sold the chickens (and pigs) to the slaughterhouses anyway[1]. Most of the others got slaughtered too or put to work in the egg-producing sweatshops (not the pigs though, they don't lay eggs). Many unsuspecting Belgians ate these chicken (and pig)-products for about four months. Election time was coming around again, so one political party (opposition of course) decided to crack this story wide open and create a public outcry.

All God-fearing Belgians were mad because they now had a Bigger Chance of getting cancer (most of these winers also smoked several cigarettes daily, even when it is proven that smoking a single cigarette or even drinking a beer is more likely to give you cancer than eating the odd dyoxine chicken, but who's counting, right?) and the elections turned out to be a total disaster for the current government, whilst the other parties fared pretty well[2].

Meanwhile, some of the chickens that had to be destroyed to protect the populace somehow ended up in other animal food. I am not making this up. When someone told the slaughterhouses and the food companies that this was a Bad Idea, they were like "Huh? Why? Oh, you mean ... hey! We didn't think of that! Whoopsie!" So then we couldn't eat pork or cattle or practically any kind of animal with any fat on it for a while. Did I mention that we'd been eating dyoxine infested food for like four months now?

Oh, I did. Good. Anyway, a bit later someone suggested that maybe we should scrap milk and its byproducts too, since the cows that give the milk ate the chickens that ate the dyoxine-food. This statement was first said to be rubbish. Then it was said that maybe we shouldn't drink milk anymore. Then it was said that that was rubbish.

By then noone ate anything anymore. Angry Belgian farmers blocked the French border to stop meat from being imported because it was "unfair competition". We had no food left. All we had to live on was Coca Cola. Then some people got sick from the coke. Having learned its lesson, the government immediately banned all products made by The Coca Cola Company. Now we had nothing to drink either.

We still don't. We're starving. Please send help quickly. Soon we might have to start eating our government. God knows they're fat enough to feed us all for a couple of days. Don't force us to become cannibals, please! We'll stop sleeping with children, we promise!

Nils "skinny Belgian" Desle

[1] Okay, some got tested and dyoxine was discovered. They even notified the authorities, but somehow *cough* bribes *cough*, nothing much came of it.

[2] Especially the particular party that pooped the proverbial party with the dyoxine chicken story. What a coincidence eh? Too bad extreme-right also benefited a lot from the protest votes.