Things you shouldn't eat, really

By: John Bailey

Posted: 11/7/08

Anything under
your fingernails

In a fit of late-night munchies, the more ingenious of you may have noticed that your too-long fingernails are starting to look a little bit like your own personal produce garden. What treasures lie beneath those cloudy nubs? The doctors tell us to get plenty of colors in each meal, and the gunk you've built up over the past week is positively prismatic. But an important caveat, especially if you're an art student: don't eat it. It might be turpentine.

Lead

I don't know if you know this - it was a rude surprise to me the first time. When someone asks you to "eat lead," they're not just suggesting a low-fat, mineral-rich snack. No, they're actually just going to shoot you with a gun. The public needs to know!

Textbooks

In the rough and tumble of college life, eating tends to slip your mind. The dining hall hours can't accommodate your bizarre, 30-hour- day schedule. You start eying that pile of feminist philosophy books you've been keeping your beer on. Knowledge is power, power is energy, energy is mass and you've been looking to bulk up your pecs lately, so there you go. But remember this: power also corrupts. Is it really worth it?

Whitney Dining Hall's

turnip-and-onion gratin

Damnit, Whitney. I ate lunch five minutes ago and I'm still hungry.

People

You've probably got it all figured out by now - life is just a big popularity contest. College, the professional world, Bingo Wednesday in the retirement home - it's about who you know, what they think of you and how good their hair is. And ifyou really want to befriend the smartest people with the best hair, you can't go around eating humans. Though delicious, it's a great way to lose friends and make enemies. Little known fact? Not a single Fortune 500 CEO is also a professed cannibal. The numbers don't lie.

Car keys
I used to have a friend who ate car keys. So you know, every time I was about to leave, I'd say, "Hey, where's my keys?" And my friend would be there and say, "Yo, I don't know, man." And I'd tell him that he was a real jerk, you know, and then I'd wait for him to regurgitate my damn car keys so I could go to the store and buy some milk. Don't eat car keys. Think of the milk.

Jet engine fuel
It doesn't work. I already tried. Trust me.

Fast spiders
This isn't really a should so much as it is a "can." Slow spiders, fine, go hog-wild; they're full of protein and the poisonous ones can build up your toxin resistance if you ever plan on becoming a hated dictator. But fast spiders? Like, faster than you? When your two sore legs are crying for mercy, they've still got another six ready to go. What's that, you say? Spiders don't run that way? Again: you've never seen a fast spider. They're a whole different ballgame, baby.