Food And Drug Administration To Relax Frozen Cherry Pie Standards

            The Associated Press recently reported that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will soon roll back long-standing regulations on the content of frozen cherry pies. Currently, the federal government mandates that all frozen cherry pies contain at least 25 percent cherries by weight and that no more than 15 percent of those cherries can be blemished. I wish I could have sat in on the debates surrounding those numbers.

“Sen. Kennedy, with all due respect, I believe if each frozen pie contained at least 20 percent cherries by weight and no more than 18 percent of those cherries were blemished in any way, that would be sufficient.”  

“Sen. Strom, you cold-hearted troglodyte! You probably want to throw my grandma off a cliff, too, don’t you? Fascist slime!”

“Well, there’s no damn reason for government sticking its nose in people’s cherry pies and mandating 35 percent cherries by weight with no more than 9 percent blemished, you bleeding-heart Marxist!”

Lee Sanders, of the American Bakers Association (ABA), told the AP that, while she welcomes the rules roll back, she doesn’t believe it will have much effect on the market. She said, “I feel confident our members are producing cherry pies with more than enough cherries,” noting that consumer demand ultimately determines the make-up of pies.

Yet, some folks are upset that other pies don’t have similar regulations. Apparently the same is true of French dressing. I kid you not. The Association for Dressings and Sauces (ADS?) says that not all dressings are subject to the same restrictive standards. The government isn’t consistent in its red tape? I’m gob-smacked! Fortunately, Trump’s FDA is also considering relaxing the rules for French dressing and is expected to post a plan to that effect on or around May 3^rd.

There Trump goes again, throwing caution to the wind in his quest for deregulation. What’s next, revoking the standards for how many fries in a Happy Meal or the number of grains of salt in a Morton’s salt packet? Will the FDA abdicate its solemn responsibility to regulate the number of peas in a pod, or the number of holes per-square-foot in Swiss cheese? Utter chaos! The wild, wild west returns to food production.

If you listen to the mainstream media, life used to be a bowl of cherries before Trump came along. But, soon, all we will have left are the blemished ones. And the pits.

I promise you, the reader, that I haven’t cherry-picked this article. And I won’t relax my standards. At least 25 percent of the words in my posts are first-class elements of speech, and no more than 15 percent of my phrases are blemished.