Published in "Opinion/Commentary", Sun Sentinel, FL, April 16, 2023

A modest proposal: Florida Must Ban the Casserole

Karen Sirabian

In the feverish push for legislation in Florida aimed at preventing books, race, equality and other noxious ideas from polluting our society, there is something much closer to home and more important that these folks have overlooked. I speak of the casserole, that lowly combination of maybe three ingredients that has taken this country by storm. After becoming popular during the Great Depression, the casserole burst on the national scene in the 1950s, spurred on, no doubt, by a cabal of canned soup companies and Big Government, desperate to promote the food pyramid in palatable form. The repellent dish finally died out in the 1970s, but today, it has become more popular than ever. It is time to address this scourge and save our American kitchens.

You may wonder how something as innocuous as a recipe could be harmful to the national psyche, but it is precisely this unassuming nature of the dish that makes it so dangerous. The casserole has wormed its way into every aspect of the fabric of society. From community dinners, to religious gatherings, to bereavement visits, to school lunches, even to establishments dedicated to fine dining — the casserole has become ubiquitous, often unavoidable. The danger is very real, particularly for our children.

Awash in casseroles, legions of children will never realize that a chicken can be roasted and served whole and that vegetables actually come in different colors and flavors, not just cream of mushroom. Creative cuisine, once available to all, will be relegated to the elite. This is no accident, and in fact, there are other examples of such manipulation that are far graver. A strong case can be made that casseroles were invented by lazy Northern cooks in an effort to destroy Southern cuisine.

For all these reasons, to restore decency and moral integrity to our kitchens, we must ban the casserole. I propose that all cookbooks be scoured for any references to casserole recipes and that these be deleted. This includes any mention of the “hot dish,” which we all know is a casserole masquerading under another name. Cookbooks dedicated to making casseroles should be banned outright and pulled from all public places. Further, any reference, whether in print, audibly or online, to the words “tuna” and “casserole” in the same sentence should be punishable by a $10,000 fine and three years’ imprisonment.

There will be, I realize, some objections. What, you ask, of our beloved mac and cheese? Well, as any good culture warrior knows, in the battle for the moral fiber of our nation, some sacrifices must be made. There can be no exceptions.

I appeal to our governor, who has manfully carried the banner of morality into our living rooms, our bedrooms and our bathrooms, to enter this last battleground, our kitchens, and help us restore integrity to our cuisine. Florida can light a path forward on this critical issue. And where Florida leads, the nation will surely follow.

Praise God, and pass the mashed potatoes.

First published July 18, 2023 in The Sun Sentinel "Opinion" Section as "AI Got a Few Things Wrong When it Told Me About My Book; Namely Everything."

My Day With AI: A Cautionary Tale

By Karen Sirabian

The other day I decided it was time to engage with Chatgpt and other AI programs to see for myself what the fuss was all about. I framed a question: give me a good book description for Hogge Wild: A Gordon Strange Mystery (the book I published last summer). In less time than it took me to type the question, Chatgpt generated five engaging paragraphs with rich descriptions of the main character, his motivation, plot twists—everything you would expect from a well written piece of jacket copy or book blurb. It was astonishingly well done, and plausible. There was only one problem. All of the actual details were wrong. Wrong setting, wrong victim, wrong crime. I was immediately reminded of an old college professor who scrawled on a classmate’s literature paper: “You said nothing very well. D+.” Here, as opposed to nothing, incorrect information was presented splendidly.

Back when the earth’s crust was cooling, I had my first job in publishing for a small but well-regarded trade book company known for books and studies on cutting edge technology, the publishing industry and media in general. My editor-in-chief, who led many of these studies, made extensive use of comparisons to illustrate the trends he was identifying and it often fell to me, as an editorial assistant, to fill in his blanks. I still remember the first assignment he handed me: a sentence typed out on a sheet of yellow scratch paper, saying: “The number of checks being cashed daily (X) is rapidly approaching the number of grains of sands in the ocean.” It was my job to identify X, if not exactly then an approximate number that would stand up to scrutiny once in print. Many days later, through extensive interviews and research among government agencies, bank trade organizations, experts in the field I was able to do so, grateful that at least he had not asked me to count the number of grains of sand in the ocean. When the study was finally published, that number—X—became a benchmark figure, reported over and over. It became fact. From that point forward identifying the source of information coming my way, and the credibility of that source, became a mantra. If not an obsession.

Fast forward to 2023. Answers to questions are at our fingertips, but all too often those answers are a murky soup of facts, misinformation and outright lies blended as expertly as the five paragraphs my chatbot created. And can we really expect people, exhausted by three years of pandemic trauma and inundated with carefully curated silos of information, to question the source of the information they are getting? Much less care?

The compelling narrative created by my bot took a page, unintentionally, out of the conspiracy theorists’ playbook, weaving a credible, totally incorrect narrative incorporating just enough obvious facts to make it seem true. It wasn’t bad enough that we have people cobbling together half-baked theories for monetary gain or power, now we’ve got a program to help them do it. Chatgpt and other AI programs scrape the internet to craft their responses so the possibility for recycling and repeating errors, sometimes deliberate ones, is considerable. The old computer adage, “garbage in, garbage out,” still applies.

AI will become ubiquitous in our lives, probably before I’ve finished this sentence. But we can’t allow it to do our thinking for us. Maybe one day we can rely on the machines to help us police themselves. Until then, if we value truth, we’ll have to continue trying to count the number of grains of sand in the ocean.