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We here at Celebrity Cooking Magazine do live in the real world outside the kitchen and cookbook. One Cook

inescapable part of that wider world is the news, and embedded in that news like gristle in an otherwise acceptable cut of slightly down-market meat are these recurrent phrases or terms that we find ourselves chewing on, ones that make us grimace every time we encounter them. We can spit them out, but they will soon be replaced with more of the same, or something equally indigestible.

There are several contenders for the dubious crown of most annoying and least appetizing: holy city; collateral damage; intelligent design; no bid contract; acceptable level of torture; the list goes on in numbing perpetuity. Rarely are these words or phrases subjected to any serious scrutiny, their meaning--if they even have one--given the thought and consideration we routinely devote to the fat content of sale hamburger or relative cheesiness of corn chips.

One such term much in the news these days because of the election season has taken on the intensely grating aspect of dull and overzealously applied microplane; so much so that it bears some thought and comment.

The term is ‘values voter’.

Now your mind may work differently from ours, but when we hear that term we hear the echo of a related and equally undistinguished term: value meal.

We all know what value meals, and items on a value meal menu are; we have encountered them at our local ‘regal’ or other purveyor of burgers and other fast food.

And we know them for what they are: stunted, inferior, pathetically simplified versions of the real thing. The value menu is a restricted listing of downsized and dumbed-down options. Advertised as a way to stretch a buck, they are really there for diners unable or unequipped to cope with making complicated choices--with thinking. The value meal burger is one kind of burger, and one kind only, smaller and premade, with less meat and fewer confusing, possibly sinful toppings contained inside the bun. The value meal French fries are a few potato slices short of a sybaritically full bag; the prune-mouthed puritanical antithesis of a liberal portion. Value meal chicken nuggets are a mean and pitiful serving, a few over-breaded morsels rattling around in the box, guaranteed to provide insufficient nutrition to anyone hoping to promote the godless homosexual agenda.

Small. Restricted. Grudging. Less diversity of choice, and fewer toppings. More bag or box or wrapper than actual contents; the triumph of the inedible over the pleasurable. The lowest quality and least filling choices on the menu, and damn few of them.

Think of America being more of a value meal country than it has already become.

As for me, I will stick to the main menu, thank you. Be a real voter, not a values voter.

A. Sharpe Cleaver
Editor in Chief, Celebrity Cooking Magazine.

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