And Now For Something Completely Different-The Great Cheeto Outbreak
A Rejected Shouts & Murmurs Submission
“The processed corn in the Cheetos, softened by the humidity of the cave, created “the perfect environment to host microbial life and fungi,” park officials wrote. The Washington Post September 10th, 2024.
Now kids, not many could have foreseen the drastic destruction wrought to our world by a single bag of Cheetos. Yet after one fateful day in the Carlsbad Caverns—when some clumsy tourist dropped a bag into the fragile ecosystem of the caves—our species and civilization began its sudden decline.
You see Cheetos were this sort of fluorescent orange corn-based snack which coated your fingers in a fine orange powder. The removal of this orange coating was immune to even the heaviest duty of wet wipes and often required multiple washings of hands.
Besides that though, these Cheetos seemed harmless, childish and adolescent even. Sometimes even used as a derogatory insult to a certain 45th President. We did not fear Cheetos the way we do now.
Park officials first monitored how microbial life and fungi took over the bag of Cheetos (regular not Puffs) practically overnight. And while park rangers did their best to contain the damage and spread, the foreign detritus of orange dust soon spread throughout the caverns, carried by cave crickets and spiders, scorpions, mites, and flies. A new ecosystem emerged. The processed corn began to double in size and then triple as the mold and fungi began to grow, suffocate, and infect the surrounding cave system. In such a fragile environment devoid of sunlight, water, and nutrients, a mutant fungi organism emerged from the darkness of the caves the world has never before seen.
This living organism—grown from enriched cornmeal, vegetable oil, cheese seasoning, whey powder, and with a heavy artificial coloring of yellow 6—needed hosts to grow. The spread started by accident, as people tramping through the caves brought the organism back on the soles of their shoes leaving it in gas stations, airports, and their local TGI Fridays. One by one the gas stations went first as the hosts searched for more fuel to expand and grow. Then the supermarkets.
All corn-based snacks were soon outlawed—Cheetos, Fritos, Doritos, Tortilla Chips, Chex-Mix, even Bugles. That doesn’t mean people obeyed the law. People engaged in the illicit trade and consumption of corn snacks, sometimes leading to their own imprisonment and/or death. Rehab clinics sprung up to stop the spread of illegal Cheeto consumption, but by then it was too late.
The rest of the story is now known well: How the cities of Santa Fe and Albuquerque fell. The battle of Frito-Lay in Plano, Texas. How, as the world got drier, the organism spread North, East, and West. Soon the entire earth was as orange as Mars is Red.
Who could’ve known what our world would become? Although, I guess, in a certain way, it follows a plot not unlike that one video game that was turned into an HBO original series starring Pedro Pascal (I guess that part makes sense and might even seem a bit derivative).
You might not believe it from your cold white dormitories here on the moon kids, but you are lucky to have missed those last days of the Great Orange Cheeto Outbreak. So, in answer to your question, Marina, that is how the Earth ended, not with a bang, or a whimper, but with a bag of Cheetos in the bottom of a cave in the Carlsbad Caverns in the state of New Mexico in the year 2024.