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
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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
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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."
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