Bean Salad, Anyone?

Whenever I eat too much for supper, I have bad dreams.
Last night, I was back in the summer of 1951.
I had just finished my first year in Medical School
and had taken a job as a clerk in the country store
in the village in the Virginia mountains where my
parents lived. It was an old-fashioned store,
but the proprietor was working to modernize it.
That summer, however, foodstuffs were still stored
in various open barrels, one of which contained crackers,
another contained sugar, and one was filled with bean salad,
and that was the one that caused the trouble.

Not that customers didn't like it. The bean salad
was, in fact very popular; the trouble was,
it tasted so good that customers ate too much of it;
it made them sick, and they came back and scolded 
the proprietor for having sold it to them,
and he got tired of being scolded.

It so happened that in the room next door, 
the proprietor had stored some new canning equipment;
he knew that times were changing,
and he wanted to keep up with them
by starting his own cannery.
The canning equipment was manufactured
by an outfit called HMO Industries.
It had been supplied with lots of new bright,
shiny four and eight ounce cans
to get the new cannery off to a good start,
all of them elegantly stamped HMO, waiting to be used.
So the storekeeper figured he would kill two
birds with one stone by canning the beans,
sealing them in airtight containers
to prevent spoilage, and selling them
to his gluttonous customers in smaller,
admittedly more expensive
but infinitely healthier quantities.

Since the cans were all embossed "HMO" the proprietor
thought he ought to change the name of the beans to
go with the inscriptions of the cans. "H" he decided,
stood for health, "M" was for maintenence,
but he couldn't think of a suitable word that began
with "O". He got me to go through the dictionary,
but I couldn't find one either. He said, "never mind,
let's just pretend the "O" is a "B",
and call them health maintenance beans.
The other folk in the store thought
that was a pretty smart idea, and they assured him
that since most of the customers couldn't read,
it didn't make that much difference
how you spelled beans.

I don't know how it happened, I guess I was just
playing around with the letters "B" and "O"
when something clicked in my brain,
or snapped, however you want to look at it,
and I saw that "B" and "O" began to spell botulism,
and all the Bactee that I thought was pretty useless
came back to me. "Clostridia grow in acid media,
just like bean salad, and when sealed in airtight
containers these strict anaerobes produce a deadly
toxin." That's what I had memorized for the exam,
and in those days I still believed what the textbooks
said. I talked it over with my buddies Al and Bob,
and they agreed with me.  That gave me courage.
I went up to the proprietor and said, "Mr. Smith, Sir,"
because that was his name. I explained to him about
botulinus germs, and how they grew in acid,
and airtight containers, and this terrible poison,
that would paralyze and kill everybody who ate his beans,
and all the world would mention Konnarock, Virginia
and Jonestown, South America in the same breath.
I tried to be helpful and said if
just before the cans were sealed,
he put them in a pressure cooker at 248 degrees for 30 minutes,
the spores would all be killed.
He didn't say anything for a long while,
and I thought he was going to take me up on my offer.
He looked away out the window, and then he turned to
me, and looked me in the eye:
"Son," he said to me, "you're tetched.
You just been spending too much time up there
with them damned Yankees, and its gone to yer head."
I didn't say anything,
and nobody else said anything either.
Then I saw that his face was getting redder and redder,
and he was rolling his eyes around,
before he fixed them on me again:
"You did it!" he shouted in my face.
"Them beans was perfectly good until you
brought up all that nonsense about poison.
You're the one that's poisoned them."
The noise in the little store had gotten very loud;
everybody was talking, everybody was shouting,
I couldn't tell whether they
were laughing or jeering, at him or at me.

There was sweat on my brow, and in my hair when I
woke up, my palms were cold and trembling.
Margaret, my wife, is used to my odd behavior.
"But I told you not to stay up, in front of
the computer until 3 a.m." she said, " You'll get
sick if you keep this up."

So I told my dream to my wife who is wiser
than the oracle of Apollo, and she said,
"The beans in the barrels are fee for service
medicine; they are rancid and probably contain
some botulinus spores, which don't do much harm
so long as they are exposed to air."  I interrupted
her, "What is the air which keeps the rancid beans 
from becoming poisonous?" "It is the air of freedom,"
she said, "the freedom of all to live and work in
consonance with their ideals. Please let me finish,
and don't interrupt me again.  The customers
who consume such large quantities of the rancid beans
obviously aren't very discriminating.
Mr. Smith is your quintessential entrepreneur
who doesn't care what his product does to his customer,
so long as the customer wants more and has sufficient
cash or credit. The cannery equipment manufacturer
is the government, which encourages canning to
reduce the deficit and doesn't care whether the
product is putrified or not. The cans themselves
are health maintenance organizations within which
the putrescent fee for service medicine may well
turn into poison as you suggest. None of us knows,
not even Apollo can be sure. But certainly Apollo
will never permit things to become as bad as you fear.
You want what is merely good to be perfect,
and you fear what is bad to be calamitous. 
You always go to extremes, but you make life
interesting, and I love you anyway. Go call the
broker, tell him to short the HMOs and go long
on Internet service providers, tabloid newspapers
and talk shows."