Where do people go when sugar is not a suitable substitute for gluten? Manufacturer and global two-card monte aficionado Crock Sucrose has been investing lately in a get-sweet-quick scheme that is famous for abjuring even the aspartame compromise.
"Aspartame is lame," says he. "That booger sugar is harshing my mellow yellow. So we make the scene right down to the genes. Call us extreme!"
But food researchers, just back from lunch, caution sanity in practice, if not in style. "It's all well and good to chew slowly and lean back a little, to aid digestion," says Lexi Throat, one of the co-inventors of acorn butter fat, "but when a mad entrepreneur butts into the cafeteria line and bites off more than he can chew, well - shall we say his eyes are bigger than his admittedly enormous stomach?"
Sucrose is not daunted. On a hike with alcoholic cherry pickers in the Pyrenees, he met a dainty Moroccan expatriate who introduced him to hashish made with quinoa flour.
"When I woke, I was broke," says he. "I was a good sport! It was at the Madrid airport!"
But he returned to his basement apartment in Vallejo, California, with a medical marijuana license and three thousand rupees sewed into his boxer briefs.
San Francisco Chamber Of Commerce stalker Gloria Stuff reports on business for the Bay Area Piffle, a fold out that can often be found surreptitiously hidden in copies of the Auto Trader. She writes of Sucrose, "Will he save us from our dinner tables? Will he eventually tip waitstaff more than 3%? What does he do with all the bubble gum he cajoles from stand-alone machines? This correspondent wishes she could afford broadband."
Not all of the Golden State possesses Stuff's optimism; State Representative (if not now, one day) Lester Fingers-Toes keeps an eye on the patent process and finds Sucrose's ideas dangerous, and also a little icky. "The guy rolls cigarettes with his elbows," he complains on a cable access show airing only in his mother's kitchen. "He has no more good ideas than Oregon does. His investors must be counseled, then coddled. All that money and he still hasn't bought that pinball machine he's always talking about!"
As America grapples with food allergies plainly made up by frozen pizza distributors, it's truly visionaries like Crock Sucrose that will create the next level of forwarded email from your mother. To call his quest tireless would be perhaps hyperbolic, as the thieves left one tire when they stripped his 1978 Honda Civic, but he insists he's close to a meal plan that will satisfy anyone who wishes they could just have a bagel with perhaps a little cream cheese.
"Hold on, hold on," says Sucrose, "before you get told on. Snitches are bitches! But candy is dandy. Try this, buy this, try this, buy this!"
