Like the numerous old, scared white men currently disrupting America's ongoing lurch toward equality, I was frightened.

My wife, Deborah, who is to me what the Goddess of Mercy is to several religions, talked to one of her friends on the phone. As a result, Deborah downloaded an app that tells you if the food you eat and the personal hygiene products you use will, in fact, kill you deader than the cassette tape.

You install the app on your phone, point it at the barcode on a candy bar or a bottle of hair conditioner, and a score pops up. The score is from 0-100, with zero being awfully, horribly, terribly bad for you, and quite possibility radioactive. A score of 100 indicates you've pointed the app at a raw carrot, or something else that's tasteless and good for you.

In any good American marriage, the man's health is in the wife's custody. She shoos you away from pork rinds and toward kale. She counts the beers you drink during the game, and she stops frying food about two years after you get married. The sad truth about marriage isn't that the sex gets worse the longer you're married; it's that the food gets healthier the longer you're married.

Once she had the app, Deborah stalked gleefully through the house, announcing that canned meat isn't very good for you. The canned meat we had got a score of 2. As near as I can figure, you might as well eat a bowl of Agent Orange.

"It's all right," Deborah said. "We only eat that maybe once a year."

On she went, denouncing the bags of crunchy snacks and dissing the cookies.

I was raised by people who survived the Great Depression. Their primary concern in the area of food was getting enough to eat, and they thought a plate of bleeding meat meant they were doing well here in America.

While Deborah hunted through the house, I sat on the couch, waiting for her to get to the canned spaghetti.

I don't eat that much canned spaghetti, maybe a can every couple of months, but canned spaghetti is to me what the Goddess of Mercy is to several religions. I shook all over like a frightened deer as she ran her phone over the can of spaghetti.

"Forty-eight," she said. "It's really not that bad."

I didn't take a deep breath because she was still testing stuff, but the corner of my mustached lip may have twitched like I wanted to smile.

"Oh my God!" came her small blonde voice from the bathroom.

"It's THIS," she said, holding up a bottle of body wash like it was the head of John the Baptist.

"This gets a zero," she said. "A zero. I rub the stuff all over my body every single day of my life."

In addition to telling you how bad any food or hygiene item is for you, the app also tells you exactly what bad stuff is in the chosen product.

"Formaldehyde," Deborah said. "There's formaldehyde in this body wash. Formaldehyde is in embalming fluid."

"That's probably why you look so young," I said. "Lay down on your back with a pillow under your head and hold this rosary in your hands. I want to check something out."

The body wash is in the trash. The canned spaghetti is in one of the kitchen cabinets.

One last thing: I bought her the body wash last Christmas. I swear I didn't know. The girl in the store said it smelled good, like hibiscus.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion, and read features by Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Devil's Elbow: Dancing in the Ashes of America." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.

Photo credit: ritual at Pixabay

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