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 I have a cross stitch design that features cartoonish pumpkins and the legend: “PUMPKINS ARE IMPORTANT/A pumpkin a day keeps the goblins away.”

I grew up hearing the phrase “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” No one around me took that as gospel, but it was told to reinforce the health be of eating apples; or just fresh fruit. In a time when apples were seasonal, and only red or golden delicious; and your other options were grapes (one variety only), bananas, and navel oranges. It was just accepted as a bit of folk wisdom, something handed down from the Olde Countrye, where apples grew. (We grow peaches and grapefruit in Texas, but not apples. Watermelon, too, though nobody ever thought of watermelon as “fresh fruit.” 🤷‍♂️.) 

And then I found out it was the brainchild of an ad man trying to market his client’s apples. I think it dates back to the early 20th century.

IOW, it was always bullshit. Just like the ads if my childhood reassuring mother that the bowl of edible cardboard (for all the nutritional value it had) that was mostly sugar (to make palatable) was not candy for breakfast (effectively), but part of a balanced diet. Besides, breakfast is the most important meal of the day, right? That was another ad campaign.

I had a friend who described to me his grandfather’s typical breakfast. The man was a farmer in the upper Midwest, and on winter mornings he was out at 4 a.m. tending the cows and working in the snow. He’d come in to sit down to a stack of pancakes and sausage, and he pour the grease from the sausage over the pancakes, and devour everything on his plate. And then go out into sub freezing weather and work it off. Me, I sat down to a bowl of candy, sometimes supplemented with canned and freshly baked cinnamon rolls. The most important meal of the day just gave me a serious sugar high, especially if I was fortunate enough to get chocolate or strawberry milk to drink (more sugar!).

But Mom was told it all provided essential nutrients and minerals, and probably even vitamins! So who complained? Certainly not the kids shaking like live wires from all that sugar.

(I saw my own daughter’s childhood moods shift dramatically if she got a cookie or a candy bar at the right moment. The effect is physical, and it’s very real. But soft drinks are still just liquid candy, and yet we consume those blithely, when sitting down to a bowl of candy, or just sugar, would be anathema.)

This is not a comment in American nutrition, but on hucksterism, what the law allows as “puffery.” (There is a line between fraud and puffery, but it depends entirely on how direct the damage is. The inchoate damage of eating your way into diabetes as an adult, or even triggering it in childhood, is too indistinct to create liability. Especially when there’s money to be made.

Chief Justice John Roberts raised concerns about what could happen if Boulder, Colorado, succeeds in its lawsuit seeking to hold Big Oil accountable for climate-related damages: “Presumably, if you prevail, the next day a municipality in every single state will file a lawsuit.” Dina Doll: “You know that argument that they were too big to fail? This argument seems to be they are too bad to fail.”

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) October 8, 2026

Yeah, pretty much like that. Here’s where I remind you that the Constitution and the English common law adopted in this country based legal protection on property first, and people second, and then only as subjects of the Crown, so it was a criminal offense to punch them (injuring the king’s property). But if you abused your peasants, well, you know…peasants. 🤷‍♂️ Same as it ever was. It’s why in America we called them “robber barons.” The barons had the support of the crown. The peasants, not so much. The term was meant to be derogatory. Turned out it was too apt.

American culture is built on a set of lies, chief among them that we are all created equal, but those with money, earned or inherited, are more equal than others. And then there’s the opportunity scam, the “build a better mousetrap” hustle that means you, too, can be rich one day, and escape the worries of mortal existence. That scam is sold by hucksterism, and everyone buys it.

Just like we bought the idea that Trump was a businessman (he’s not. He’s a liar and a cheat and a very lazy and incompetent con man). But mostly we bought what he was selling because no small part of American culture is about buying the con. Mark Twain understood this, but it didn’t stop him from speculating his money away from, buying grifts and cons and bamboozlements until he had to go on the lecture circuit in his old age, to give Hal Holbrook a career in the latter half of the 20th century.

The con is as American as cherry pie. Some it’s not that big a surprise we put a con man in the Oval Office; twice. Not even a very good one. Now it may be we see through the con. But I doubt it. The American con cannot fail; it can only be failed.

We’ve never tried to describe something a day that will keep them away, have we?