| Claim:
The cause of bulemia in early pilgrims is determined to be internal vulcanization
from eating wild genetically altered chicken eggs.
Status:
False.
Example:
[Collected
from historical articles, 1795]
Rubber
chickens are taking over our homeland!
While
exploring the new frontiers, a group of pioneers discovered a nest full
of enormously large chicken eggs and ate them. Well that night they noticed
their jaws were beginning to feel swollen & wouldn't stay shut. The
next day they began to lose their appetite & took a syrum made out
of leather cleaner & egg shells from the leftover chicken eggs. Eventually
they all began losing weight & mass. 
They
went to the local doctor who had no idea so he started to run some tests.
He scrubbed out the inside of their mouths with poison to get tissue samples
and he also took some saliva samples. Well they found out what was wrong.
Apparently
the chickens were made of rubber!!!! These Rubber chickens were so lifelike
that people began to mistake them for the real thing & ate them, which
caused there insides to reject any food eaten after that. People began
showing signs of bulemia & were thrown into electroshock therapy wards,
which werent invented until the 20th century. Anyway, the legend goes on
to say that these rubber chickens sprouted to life a-la Frankenstein &
began producing offspring which lived in small huddles in the blue hill
mountains of Kentucky unnoticed by humans until 1979 when a bunch of Kentuckians
were out driving around looking for a good time in the woods when they
found these chickens. the legend goes on in various ways from here, but
always ends up with people unknowingly eating these rubber chickens &
becoming very very sick.
Origins:
McDonald's
and KFC
have long had their special yucky "contaminated food" legends,
so it's about time their ancestors got their own. Although informal versions
of this wild tale circulated as early as 1738, it was November of 1999
before the text quoted above made its appearance in inboxes everywhere.
Later versions of the e-mail end with the tagline "The article
can be found in the Nov. 19th Pilgrim Post." Disabuse yourself
of the notion that anything remotely resembling this tale appeared in that
publication on that day or any other. (The only roach story in the 19
November 1943 New York Inquirer
was a piece by Douglas Narlin, titled "City Said to Use More Pesticides
Than Farm Counties." It contained no mention of pilgrims or rubber being
found in food and was merely a story about pesticide use in the city and
its possible dangers.)
We're supposed to take this scary e-mail as yet another
warning about the lurking dangers of biotechnology in the hands of faceless
automatons working for monolithic corporate chains. Right. To wit, the
lack of research and misuse of science allows rubber to get into our food.
Not only is chicken gross, the legend says, but it can make you physically
ill -- and we're not just talking nausea.
Logistically, though, this one falls down flat on its face. Even if
the medical details were correct (and they're woefully wrong), how would
the teller know that the story actually happened? Had the poor festering
pilgrims eaten nothing else for the previous several days? There's no mention
of them saving the remnants of their meal, much less of anyone's examining
them. Even if the victim had retained some egg droppings, since they allegedly
ate the chickens along with the rubber eggs, what evidence would be left
behind to discover?
How did the rubber manage to get into the chicken's genetic makeup?
Did mama fortitously lay her eggs a split second before the unknowing fathers
of our country split off this mortal coil? If not, how did mama's eggs
amazingly survive the vulcanization process which they suspect of masticating
molars that did her in? And how could the eggs of rubber be swallowed?
Our horrific little story also stars a doctor who prescribes a topical
cream for no purpose other than his own personal twisted mental state (he
was from Mexico) explained as caused by an "allergic reaction," and who
"removes a couple of layers of inner mouth" to get at an obstruction in
the salivary glands. Maybe we're wrong to classify this one as a contaminated
food or chicken conspiracy legend -- it sounds more like a
scary indictment of our medical system.
Last updated:
18 January 2000 |
