One of the most absurd yet enjoyable horror spoofs ever was “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes,” a film I found myself thinking about as I sank to my knees and offered thanks to Shinto, the god of food (as well as agriculture, rice and – go figure – fertility and foxes), for New York City’s all-powerful New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. I wasn’t thankful for a layer of bureaucracy that isn’t in my state or city, though that’s probably worth a word of two of gratitude to Shinto, but because the Health Department has cleared up all lingering confusion about trans fat.

And we were confused. Back when the margarine versus butter debate was tilting in margarine’s favor, these partially hydrogenated artery-clogging fats that have New York on the brink of complete cardiac collapse were touted as a healthy alternative to saturated fats. How fat that is created with a dose of hydrogen gas, the “H” in the H-bomb capable of decimating millions of people, can be considered a “healthy alternative” is as mysterious as how New York will actually enforce its trans fat ban.

Perhaps before trans fats are banned completely, some smart scientist should try to re-engineer them so they actually blow the clogged artery wide open, the way a souped-up snow plow might bust through a 10-foot drift. It could happen. We are only limited by our imagination. For example, I personally would never have thought to splice fish genes into a tomato to make it winter hardy, so who’s to say more engineering on these trans fats wouldn’t render angioplasty and stents obsolete?

I was still on my knees being grateful for the wisdom of Big Brother – er, New York’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene – when I heard on the news that several people had been sickened by E. coli bacteria after eating at a certain fast-food chain restaurant that has one of the most, if not the most, annoying Christmas commercials ever. (Please, not again.)

Like the homicidal tomatoes in the movie, other varieties of fresh produce – lettuce, spinach, the green leafies so important to continued good health and clear eyesight – appear to be intent on settling old scores and exacting a kind of “Montezuma’s revenge” throughout the kingdom of life. While everyone plays dumb about the source of the E. coli contamination, you can bet the lettuce, like the spinach before it, knows that putting a truck garden requiring irrigation next to a mega hog facility that creates mega amounts of fecal matter is a mega invitation to a mega disaster.

My mind went from the absurd “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” to a heartbreakingly real phenomenon occurring in Africa, India and Southeast Asia related recently in The New York Times Magazine by Charles Siebert in his fascinating report, “Elephant Crackup.” This has nothing to do with the Republican Party’s humiliation at the polls last month but, rather, concerns the increasingly bellicose relationship between previously peaceful elephant herds and human beings. In Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia, elephants are damaging crops and villages and attacking and killing human beings as a result of chronic stress – what Siebert called “a kind of species-wide trauma” not unlike the trauma experienced by young boys whose parents were tortured and killed in Africa’s bloody civil war.

In these fictional (“Attack of the Killer Tomatoes”) and true (“Elephant Crackup”) accounts, it becomes abundantly clear that no deed tinkering with the balance of nature ever goes unpunished. It brings to mind the trans fat – er, margarine – commercial years ago: “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.”

Beth Dalbey can be reached by e-mail at bethdalbey@bpcdm.com.