Enjoyable Things You Should Now Feel Guilty About

By Aaron J. Waltke

We all have moments when it seems the world is ready to crush us.  When the least of your worries become the greatest of them, and when it seems you just don’t have the energy to take another step, let alone mail off your mortgage payment.

To get you motivated to make it to the end of the work week and help lift your spirits from the doldrums and routines of modern existence, I’ve decided to give you three things you thought were relatively harmless pleasures that are, in fact, sources of considerable evil.

1.) Fiji Water

Ah, yes. Delicious, health-sustaining bottled water from the exotic and intriguing island springs of Fiji. Surely, Fiji water is possibly the most trendy water on the market, and rightly so. Drink to your heart’s content, right?

Think again.

On December 6th, 2006, Commodore Josaia Voreqe (Frank) Bainimarama, Commander of the Republic of Fiji Military Forces, staged a bloody coup d’état which overthrew the democratic government that had been in place, effectively dissolving the parliament, banishing the Prime Minister and holding the President Ratu Josefa Iloilo hostage until he would do his bidding.

The Commodore then proceeded to install himself as the military dictator of Fiji, reigning over it with an iron fist and threats of heavy censorship and coercion, even going so far as to have the military occupy the local newspaper when it threatened to print disparaging remarks against the Commodore. To this day, Bainimarama continues as the unelected Fijian overlord, despite numerous protests from the UN and the outside world as well as suppressed murmurings of dissention within Fiji itself.

Since Fiji brand water is “proudly bottled on location in the Yaqara Valley of Viti Levu, Fiji”, a substantial portion of every tax dollar made there goes straight into the blood coffers of the dictator’s dystopian regime. How refreshing!

2.) Cheese

For every vegetarian out there who thought he was doing the world a favor by “sparing the lives of God’s living creatures” through his refusal to eat meat: do your homework.

Setting aside the terrible fact that most milk production methods involve ungodly hormone injections and horrific living environments for cows caged into wooden boxes and forced to stay in a constant state of pregnancy so that they always lactate, most cheeses (and this includes even your store-bought Kraft variety) contain a little ingredient called “animal rennet,” or simply “rennet.” Sounds innocuous enough.  That is, until you do even the slightest amount of research and discover that animal rennet is just a fancy term for enzymes extracted from the stomach lining of young calves.

“But wait!” you might exclaim. “Maybe they have a way of extracting the rennet from the baby cows that doesn’t hurt them?” Well, since the most common process involves “stomachs of young calves sliced into small pieces and then put into saltwater or whey,” I’m going to take a shot in the dark and say no.

Are there alternatives to animal rennet? Yes. Are they used very often? Not really. So, in most cases, you’re eating cow infant stomach lining grated onto your pasta parmigiana. Mmmm!