For those of you unable to attend the North Carolina State Fair this week, your intrepid fitness reporter brings you the latest in culinary suicide: Fried Coke.

The Associated Press reports:

Just when it seemed that vendors at the North Carolina State Fair have deep-fried everything possible, there's the latest offering: Deep-fried Coca-Cola.

Here's the recipe: Mix funnel-cake batter with Coke instead of water. Pour the batter into the fryer and cook up a mass of doughy strands. Stuff into a Coca Cola cup, sprinkle with powdered sugar and douse with pure Coke syrup. Top it with whipped cream and a cherry.

Some random thoughts:

1. Who's your audience?

Some foods seem to be perverse on purpose. Not just an "I'll eat what I want and health be damned" attitude, which is philosophically defensible if you value pleasure now over suffering later; but an "I'll eat what I want just to show the world that I don't give a damn what you think" attitude, which of course is all about caring very much what the rest of us think.

Do what you want - but don't do it so overtly just to posture for my disapproval.

2. What would Jesus eat?

Or maybe I'm misinterpreting, and the whole Fried Coke ethos is just a bunch of people giving up on the possibility of a healthy life in a normal-sized body. Just as my college roommates would brag about how little sleep they got or how drunk they got on Saturday night, folks today view their utter disregard for their bodies as evidence of bravado.

North Carolina is a religiously conservative state. Near my house in Durham there are dozens of churches, of all shapes, sizes and denominations. They all have those message boards with magnetic letters under class. How come they never preach about how angry and disappointed the deity is that we're treating our bodies - these precious temples of divinity-made-flesh - with such contempt?

3. Possibly Vegan

If the whipped cream is some synthetic non-dairy variety, then it's entirely possible that Fried Coke is in fact vegan. Wow! Now all my vegan friends can chow down without guilt!

While I understand where the vegan impluse comes from (animal rights, environment, personal health, etc.), I have to say that veganism as an "-ism" misses the point. Veganism is by definition a diet of exclusion: you're a vegan because you don't eat animal products. It says nothing about what you do eat. You can live on deep-fried Oreos (and now Coke) and be entirely free of the taint of animal suffering and death.

Being vegan says nothing about the quality of the foods you do eat. I'd much rather see someone I care about eat small amounts of meat and get lots of whole fruits and vegetables, whole grains, beans, raw nuts and seeds, than live on processed foods made from chemicals and corn syrup.

If you're a vegan for environmental or ethical reasons, consider that you're an animal and you're part of the environment. Remember Chief Seattle, "What do you do to one part of the web you do to all." Poison yourself, and you're also poisoning the rivers and forests and skies. Treat yourself like garbage and how do you expect to be able to treat animals any better?