You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [53]
Of course, it wasn’t all on “the man.” The chart gave our fat asses too much wiggle room. Choosing from the items listed in each section, you could eat three cheeseburgers, down two glasses of OJ, three servings of fries (cooked in McDonald’s new low-fat lard!), a box of Lucky Charms, and go to bed telling your body it could thank you on your hundredth birthday.
As for those new chemically engineered low-fat miracle foods, studies show no evidence that they have any effect on heart or overall body health. Eleftheria Maratos-Flier, director of obesity research at Harvard’s Joslin Diabetes Center says, “For a large percentage of the population, perhaps 30 to 40 percent, low-fat diets are counterproductive. They have the paradoxical effect of making people gain weight.”
Nutritionists hold out hope that we might turn a corner in the next fifteen years though, when the costs of airlifting children to school passes the $500 billion mark.
THE GRUESOME ORIGINS OF FIVE POPULAR FAIRY TALES
FAIRY tales weren’t always for kids. Back when these stories were first told in the taverns of medieval villages, there were very few kids present. These were racy, violent parables to distract peasants after a hard day’s dirt farming, and some of them made Hostel look like, well, kid’s stuff.
5. LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD: INTERSPECIES SEX PLAY, CANNIBALISM
The version you know
On her way to her grandmother’s, Little Red Riding Hood meets the Big Bad Wolf and stupidly tells him where she’s going. He gets there first, eats Grandma, puts on her dress, and waits for Red.
She gets there, they do the back-and-forth about what big teeth he has, and he eats her. Then, a passing woodsman comes and cuts Red and Grandma out of the wolf, saving the day.
What got changed
Like many fairy tales, the modern version of “Little Red Riding Hood” comes from Frenchman Charles Perrault’s seventeenth-century Mother Goose tales. While Perrault collected and retold the folktales for children, he wasn’t afraid to straight-up kill some bitches to make a point.
The big thing that changed about this one since Perrault’s version is the ending. That woodsman showing up seemed a little like a third-act movie rewrite due to bad test screening, didn’t it?
In Perrault’s version of the story, Red and her grandmother are dead. The. Goddamn. End.
Perrault’s was the PG version of the tale he’d probably heard as a boy. According to a collection of oral folktales from the Middle Ages, the earlier versions liked to spice up the sexual undertones, having Red catch on to the wolf and perform a striptease while he’s lying in bed dressed as her grandmother before running away while he’s “distracted” (note to any young girls: If you are ever abducted and menaced by someone, do not do this!).
Wait, it gets worse. In some of the early folktales, the Wolf dissects Grandmother, then invites Red in for a meal of her flesh, Hannibal Lecter-style.
Sweet dreams!
4. SNOW WHITE: PRINCE PEDOPHILE, MORE CANNIBALISM
The version you know
Evil stepmom hates that her daughter is prettier than her, so she tells one of her men to take her out to the woods, kill her, and bring back her heart as proof. He can’t follow through, so he tells her to run away.
Snow White flees and falls in with seven dwarves. The stepmom finds out and sneaks her a poison apple. Snow goes into a coma until a handsome prince rescues her and they live happily ever after.
What got changed
In the Disney film, the wicked stepmother winds up dead, so that’s already pretty hard-core. It’s got nothing on the German Grimm brothers, who wrote over a hundred years after Perrault and are probably the second most popular source for modern fairy tales. In their version, the stepmother is tortured by being forced to wear red-hot iron shoes and made to dance until she falls down dead.
The issue of Snow’s actual age is a point of contention as well. The Grimms explicitly refer to her as being seven years old when the story starts,