Frankenstein lives. But the good doctor has given up raiding cemeteries and using bad stitches to sew together his obscene monstrosities.

These days, the evil genius sits around in climate controlled laboratories and uses high-powered microscopes and itsy-bitsy needles to mix and match genetic materials from a bunch of unsuspecting critters and plants.

Tomatoes, for example, have been bioengineered with a human gene that keeps them red and juicy longer.

Maybe these things are perfectly safe, as the bioengineers claim, or maybe we’re sewing the seeds of our own destruction.

In America, bioengineered produce is put in the same can or package as natural produce without any indication on the label that what you’re eating is anything other than 100 percent of whatever you thought you were buying.

The Europeans – being a tad more paranoid from years of living through nuclear terrorist attacks by evil megalomaniacs and having gotten used to dodging missiles and machinegun fire during car chases between British Secret Service agents with licenses to kill and KGB bad guys with a fondness for torture and exotic murders – want no part of bioengineered crops.

They’ve gone out and destroyed test fields of mutated…er, that is, ‘engineered’…corn and they run out and protest every time the subject of genetically altered crops come up.

Companies doing business over in Europe do not send genetically altered food over there and make a big show of being against it so they won’t have a passel of protestors outside the front door holding up progress.

The companies that supply canned and frozen foods, and some fresh produce, to Americans don’t bother to let anybody know that them tasty tomatoes on pizzas, in spaghetti and sprinkled on salads are full of human genetic material that’s been added to seeds and grown just like regular crops.

Whoa, I just ate a pizza last night and I enjoyed the hot, bubbly tomato sauce squeezing out from beneath the cheese and pepperoni. It was a regular slobber-fest of delight as I sucked that dribbly tomato sauce off my lower lip and caught the stray glob of cheesy goodness upon my chin, which I would quickly wipe off with my index finger and – umm, ummm – stick that finger in my mouth and swirl my tongue around to make sure every iota of delightful sauce was devoured.

The memory of that delight now makes me shudder with revulsion because I suspect it makes me a cannibal.

Now that I’m reliving the horror of eating that pizza, I feel as if I was a participant in a pagan festival; one where painted heathens are frenetically dancing around a huge bonfire – a fire where an unfortunate virgin is being roasted alive – and when the fire dies down all the savages fall upon the body of that poor girl like a bunch of drunken rednecks at a pig pickin’.

Which makes me shudder all the more because I’ve been to a few pig pickin’s in my life – and I loved them all! Maybe that makes me a heathen.

If there’s human genetic material in tomatoes, and I’ve read that there is, then every tomato-eating American is a cannibal – accursed by God and forever denied entry into Paradise.

Altered foods were first put on the market in 1992.

In Revelations, only 144,000 folks out of seven billion are going to be pure enough to survive the apocalypse – which is about how many folks don’t like tomatoes or things made from tomatoes.

You think that’s foolish? Revelations 14:4, says that the 144,000 survivors “are they which were not defiled with women…”

Remember your slang – women were once called tomatoes.

Obviously, St. John, author of Revelations, didn’t mean there would be no women in heaven – that certainly wouldn’t be very heavenly, would it?

In a loose translation of St. John, replace “tomatoes” for “women” and you’re gettin’ at the truth of who goes where at the end of time.

 

Keith Hoggard is a Staff Writer at Roanoke-Chowan Publications. Contact him at keith.hoggard@r-cnews.com or 252-332-7206.