Tomato Sauce: A Renewable Energy Source

Driving back from Washington D.C. I was listening to the Dems talk about the need to replace fossil fuel as the number one driver of the nation's economy. I was looking for some way to conceptualize the flawed logic of all this alternative energy propaganda. The only thing I could come up with as I pounded the miles off on I-66 was Italian Tomato Sauce.

In my enchanted land of Italian Cuisine tomato sauce flows from the ground. The best sauce ever exists in abundance waiting to be ladled over one's favorite linguine. However, the Grand Potentate decreed this readily available sauce to be dirty. A decree was issued that all Tomato Sauce was to be made out of fresh tomatoes picked by guest workers and cooked for hours in big factories in Iowa.. The process required much labor and energy. The sauce also had to be canned. Since all the canneries are located in China the sauce had to be loaded on super-tankers for the trip to China, and then returned to the United States on huge container ships. The new canned tomato sauce didn't taste as good as the natural sauce, it also didn't cling to the pasta like the the natural sauce. The canned sauce was also corrosive to pots and utensils.

As people forgot how to go to the pond and ladle the natural sauce they became more and more dependent on the evil tomato growers. In a bold move the Grand Potentate decided to end the nation's dependence on tomatoes. To placate the Maine lobbyists he decreed that cranberries would be substituted for tomatoes. This made the sauce very expensive and quite tart. People ate less and less pasta and eventually forgot that the best sauce in the world was all around them.

However, somewhere deep in the the forest an elderly hermit who never got the memo, bends down and dips his bread in the best sauce on Earth.