Henrietta Hay's Column

Taking potshots at parsnips or blasting broccoli or casting aspersions on apples or criticizing cantaloupe may soon be illegal.

Watch it, kids, if you take an apple to the teacher. Just leave it on her desk without comment and if she makes a nasty crack about it, call the cops.

The world is full of weird things, but this strikes me as one of the weirder. A bill recently proposed in the Colorado Legislature would open people to lawsuits if they spread information about a food product, which they knew or should have known to be untrue. It might make it pretty risky to disparage food products. When I was a kid I disparaged a lot of them. One tends to forget, but I think our dog grew fat and lazy on my disparagement - when my mother wasn't looking.

One food after another is declared to be harmful if eaten, drunk, touched or breathed. And a year or two later, the research sometimes turns out to be wrong. But we go right on eating. I believe the Alar on apples scare was the immediate reason for concern. And do you remember grapes from South America a year or so ago? But we are still eating apples and grapes and beef and even broccoli. Well, some of us are.

Complaining about food, either publicly or privately, is a favorite American pastime, second only to eating, and I doubt that passing a law is going to stop it. Kids start before they can talk.

My granddaughter visited me when she was a toddler and I feared every morning when I woke up that she would have dried up and blown away from lack of food. As nearly as I could determine, she lived on nothing but occasional sips of orange juice. Her parents assured me that her pediatrician said she was perfectly normal, and she certainly has grown into a healthy young woman. But she has not outgrown her original prejudice against food. Her seventh grade class spent a week in Paris last year. I wondered how she would survive on "foreign" food. Anything even remotely unusual had never passed her lips. She did survive, and she had a wonderful time, but she lost ten pounds in ten days. And she had to stand up twice to cast a shadow before she left.

One of my own kids had a horror of what he called "things in stuff". That included such wonderful items as spaghetti, chili, potato salad and pistachio ice cream. And onions! Forget them. Fortunately he outgrew it and will now eat anything in sight.

I know a kid that runs screaming from an egg. I don't know whether he has figured out that there are eggs in chocolate cake, but I'm sure not going to be the one to tell him.

Personally, I will eat almost anything, but there are a few exceptions. I dislike raisins and have not been discretely quiet about it. In fact, one year a friend baked me a birthday cake and put my age on it with - yuck - raisins. Nobody who was there has ever allowed me to forget it. For the record, I did eat a few of the little black things while people were watching but the chipmunks got all I could sneak under the picnic table. Maybe my comments would be illegal today. They certainly were public and negative. Like most food prejudices, disliking raisins is quite unreasonable. After all, I like grapes and sunlight. Anyway, the dancing raisins have almost converted me. How could anyone dislike those happy little guys?

Mark Twain says, "Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education." As we all get trained our tastes change, but we continue to gripe and complain about food. Oh well, why not?

In spite of the happy raisins, I think I will continue to pitch their little brothers under the table.