I know a girl who thinks of ghosts
She’ll make ya breakfast
She’ll make ya toast
She don’t use butter
She don’t use cheese
She don’t use jelly
Or any of these
She uses Vaseline.

Now, I used to think these lyrics were just the silly rhymings of the sort of folks who are prone to unsanctioned self-medication. But now I think that The Flaming Lips may soon be spoken of in the same breath with Nostradamus, as the prognostic significance of these words becomes increasingly clear.

As ET has recently stated, the Western world (so as to simultaneously save the Earth from gases and save the proletariat from $3.00 gas) has decided to cure our addiction to the cheap and abundant resource of fossil fuel by replacing it with the precious and rare resource known as “food.” I believe the means to achieve this retrograde transubstantiation is called “subsidy.”

Since the subsidy reaction (discovered in Europe, but refined in America) is driven by the laws of politics, rather than science, it is free to ignore basic arithmetic, which foolishly indicates that there is not enough food in all the world to replace more than a fraction of our current fossil fuel use. Our fuel use, however, is large enough to consume all our food without so much as burping.

Just a year or so into our current ethanol mania, the effects of feeding high quality grain to our cars are already beginning to show. Mexican maize is too valuable to waste on tortillas for poor people and milk prices are increasing faster than gas prices, as the dairy cows of America now have to compete for corn with the pork producers on Capitol Hill. Even now, it would be cheaper to replace the kid’s milk with E85. This boondoggle of BTU binge drinking has triggered the planting of the biggest corn crop since World War II. And we’re just getting started! While many short-term fluctuations can be expected, the long-term needs of our new policy all point to large-scale conversion of valuable food into vulgar fuel.

For a while this had me worried. What would the world’s masses eat? Would Sally Struthers have to change those commercials to declare, “For the price of a cup of coffee, served in a collectable Limoges-ware mug, you can feed a poor person for a day?” Then Fidel Castro lapsed back into consciousness and said some of the same things as I had, and I was really worried. When Fidel and I sound alike, surely the Seventh Seal has been opened and the Beast is nigh. (Although Fidel can criticize any fuel plan, since his economy is powered by the cheap and clean-burning lost potential of his own people.)

But then I remembered The Flaming Lips and it all became clear: after we waste all our food replacing oil, we can all then figure out how to eat oil – or petroleum products, I should say, since Vaseline has already broken important ground in this regard. It’s an ambitious plan: ending our addiction to food. And it will certainly require bold leadership in Congress come appropriations time. But I think with the right combination of vision and starvation, it can be made to work.

It’s not as far-fetched as it may seem; the petroleum industry has already had minor success in the food and food-like products market. In addition to Vaseline (zero calories!), there’s that squirt cheese that comes out of a can, fake bacon, and Twizzlers™ –all of which are produced from the residues scraped out of refineries every fall and spring when they are shut down to switch between gasoline and home heating oil production.

And really, if people will eat tofu, selling them light sweet crude should be a snap. It already sounds more appetizing than high fructose corn syrup, and look how trendy that became. The product possibilities are endless: the BP BLT, the Phillips 66 Cheesesteak, Citgo’s Chávez Regal, the Texaco Tex-Mex High Octane Snack Mix, and even I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Butter brand Petr-Oleo. I can’t believe no one has thought of all this before! From Biofuels to Petrofoods. The end of the Obesity Epidemic is finally in sight.