KRISPY KREME CONTRABAND

Shit! It's an FEA raid! Quick, flush the cotton candy down the toilet
and stuff that Snickers bar up your butt! And cover that damn pimple
with some Clearasil, man! They'll know you've been using! Oh, man ...
NOBODY MOVE! Step away from the eclair and put your hands in the air,
you junk food junkie!Someone's heading to the fat farm.

Like the film Traffic on sugar and triglycerides, Christopher
Largen's novel Junk takes us on a tour of a near future "war" on junk
food, complete with a food czar, a Food Enforcement Agency, and
mandatory sentences for possession of hamburgers, doughnuts and milk shakes.

We meet: Justin Bailey, a squeaky clean cop (he won't even let his
wife call him "honey"), who is conflicted about the draconian food
laws he upholds; Moe Goodman, a celebrity preacher who counsels junk
food addicts but questions the efficacy of the ongoing "war"; and
Billy Sweet, a master doughnut baker who takes his business
underground after Congress, responding to an "epic of obesity,"
passes the "Dangerous Products Act." (We also meet his fat and
flatulent Doberman, Sugar.) And pulling the strings behind it all,
the shadowy "Candy Man," notorious supplier of marked-up sugar and
other junk food raw materials.

At first taste, even in the era of Super Size Me, the book's premise
seems absurd, perhaps just a stand-in conceit for marijuana. Largen
has written extensively elsewhere in favor of the legalization of
pot, and he certainly isn't subtle about the parallels between the
drug war and his junk war.

But then came the Cookie Monster, who in Junk has been evicted from
"Sesame Street." That hasn't happened yet, but I hear he's been
forced to push healthy snacks. So who knows. ...

In any case, the larger message of Junk is not so much "up with
sweets and red meats" as "liberty and personal responsibility for
all." Despite the occasional bit of ham- (er, I meant tofu-) handed
satire, Largen is actually quite balanced in what he writes about
junk food, acknowledging the costs - both personal and public - of
our horrid eating habits. He just rejects the idea that personal
liberty is a fair price to pay for a less corpulent, more productive
populace. Whether we're talking pot or pastries, that principle
remains the same.Junk by Christopher Largen. $17.95. ENC Press. 214
pages. www.waronjunk.com.