The Diet in literature and the dramatic arts

           1.   When my daughter Theresa was in sixth grade she wrote a short story as an English assignment.  
        Her story was about a new invention call Flavor Spray.  Flavor Spray came in a can in many flavors such as steak, cheese, pizza, french fry, glazed doughnut, cake, ice cream, chocolate, etc...pretty much any food flavor in existence.  Flavor Spray had zero calories, but when sprayed on a lettuce leaf it  made the lettuce take on the taste and texture of whatever food the flavor of the spray was.
           Flavor Spray became a huge hit, everybody bought it, and the company that produced it made billions.      
        But then people began starving to death because they were eating only lettuce leaves sprayed with Flavor Spray.   So Flavor Spray  had to be banned by the government.  
        The End.

        2.  I once wrote a play about a time in the future when disease had been wiped out.  People only got sick in order to lose weight.  If you wanted to lose weight you'd go to the hospital  where you'd be given a shot of germs to make you too sick to eat much.  You could choose from the Pneumonia Diet or the Flu Diet, or if you were in a hurry, the Stomach Bug Diet.  You'd stay sick in the hospital until you'd lost all the weight you wanted to lose, then you'd be given a shot of Enhanced  T-Cells to make you better fast.   Nobody tried to lose weight anymore by just trying to eat less;  that kind o f medically unsupervised  diet was considered ineffective and potentially  harmful to one's health.
        But then rumors and  reports were starting to surface  that in some cases the Enhanced T-Cell shots were no longer working.  People weren't getting better and not only that, others were catching their flus and pneumonias.  Fear was starting to grow among the population. 
        And that's  far as I got in my play.   I guess I should finish it.

        3.“... I realized that I have spent so many years being on a diet that the idea that you might actually need calories to survive has been completely wiped out of my consciousness. Have reached point where believe nutritional idea is to eat nothing at all, and that the only reason people eat is because they are so greedy they cannot stop themselves from breaking out and ruining their diets.”
        -Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones's Diary

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