AND NOW IT'S ORGANIC VODKA

Let's face it, Americans have always been suckers for food fads.

First we had the lo-cal, diet craze of the 50s and 60s. Jackie Gleason thought this so inane that he satirized it in an episode of the Honeymooners by coming up with a get-rich-quick scheme for marketing lo-cal pizza. That was considered laughable in the 50s, but sure enough today you can go to the freezer section of any Jewel Foods and find lo-cal pizza.

One of our obese neighbors in the 60s, an MD's wife, was so thrilled with the development of the revolutionary, new, 1 calorie Diet-Rite sodas, that a veritable mound of the returnable empties would litter her side doorstep every day.

She never seemed to lose any weight at all.

Since then we've had the lo-fat craze, lo-carb mania (I once even saw a candy bar touted as lo-carb) and of course the lite phenomenon.

The movement toward lite everything began in the late 70s with Miller's development of Lite Beer and it crested in the 80's. That was around the very time of the AIDS epidemic, when everyone was talking about condoms and safe-sex.

The simultaneous occurrence of lite everything and condom mania, prompted comic David Steinberg to quip to Johnny Carson, "You know, Johnny, we could make a fortune if we could just come up with a product called "Condoms-Lite."

But now, of course, it is the organic foods craze.

This started with a bunch of aging hippies from places like San Francisco and Evanston who thought that it would be morally superior to eat overpriced, scrawny, deformed produce trucked in to little farmers markets in their village squares every Saturday.

It was harmless enough, but now, I must say, it is clearly getting out of hand.

They are now marketing (I am not making this up) ORGANIC VODKA!!!

I was made aware of this inane development by the marquee on the Foremost Liquor store at Lincoln and Peterson, which touted the development amidst its usual ads for specials on Heinekens and Johnny Walker Red.

I went in to the Foremost to investigate, and sure enough there it was, Snow Queen Organic Vodka imported from Kazakhstan.

What??!!

When one pictures former Soviet Kazakhstan, organic purity is not what first springs to mind.

Chernobyl-styled nuclear waste dumps, perhaps, but not pristine waters and pure pesticide-free fields of rye.

Perhaps the Kazakh idea of organic is to use only camel dung from free range dromedaries to fertilize their vodka grain crops.

And besides, who really cares if their vodka is organic?

My experience has always been that the stuff is so vile tasting and alcoholicly lethal that after a few quaffs, I no more care if my vodka is organic than if my rocket fuel is organic.

At any rate, it is now available at about $30 a bottle for those gaunt, sandal-wearing organic purists in Evanston and Oak Park.

But the Snow Queen bottle and website graphics prominently feature women with rather pronounced decolletage. The website also boasts that it had busty J-Lo as guest of honor at one of its opening celebrity bashes.

I don't think that will go over so well with the ascetic organic granola crowd.

Someone has to fill the Kazakhs in on the puritanical catechism of American politically correct pecksniffs, circa 2009.