Peppermint

Peppermint (Mentha paprika) is a very dangerous herb with a distinctive smell. Originally designed by the US Army to fight the bolshevik threat, peppermint has found its way into the food industry where it is used as a flavouring in tea, sweets, chewing gum and tooth paste. This has resulted in the total collapse of communism worldwide (apart from China, where peppermint is banned on penalty of death, and Cuba, where the toxic fumes are neutralised with cigar smoke).
==Cultivation==
The peppermint plant grows best in shades areas. Left unattended, its roots will form a vast underground series of tubes that is capable of spanning the globe within weeks and suck the Earth's fertile soil dry of nutrients. Notorious peppermint outbreaks have been reported in the Sahara, Gobi and Texas.
The leaves and flower buds, which need to be collected as soon as they turn tablet-shaped, are to be dried or ground. Take extreme care not to touch any part of the plant with bare hands, especially if you have socialist empathy. The leaves can be used to make tea or category C narcotics, and the flower buds provide us with the well-known sweets that can often be found stuck to the inside of elderly ladies' dentures. When ground and added to the water supply of an unsuspecting communist or tourist nation, its inhabitants will soon convert to capitalism and start watching American sitcoms. Oil can be extracted from the remainder of the plant and used to fuel the capitalist machinery.
==History==
===First sightings===
Although some sources claim that references to peppermint can be found as far back as the ancient Egyptians, who are said to have built monumental stone greenhouses to cultivate the herb for reasons unknown (possibly for the creation of a great zombie army to drive the Atlanteans back into outer space - ref: Dr. I.L.Uminati, On the Origin of Faeces, 1983), the first reliable description of the herb and its uses to fight communism can be found in US Army records dating back to 1949. The records detail the controlled growing of peppermint on a secret military base code-named Area 51. There is a mention of possible extraterrestrial origins of the herb and its ability to instil individualistic thought in even the most fervent of socialist spirits.
===Minting communism===
Many references to peppermint can be found in official US government documents from the early fifties, when the McCarthy administration deployed so-called peppermint squads to track down communists and beat them thoroughly with a roll of mints. Peppermint at one point also was the main ingredient of nuclear bombs, before being replaced by the less dangerous but more controllable compound uranium. During the Vietnam War, Vietcong tunnels were flooded and forests defoliated with peppermint spray to drive out the communists and convert them to capitalism or beat them with sticks.
In 1989 mints were secretly distributed by the CIA amongst East-Germans, who went all minty and pushed over the Berlin Wall, thereby starting European Union capitalism and reuniting the warmongering nation of Germany. The removal of the Berlin Wall also allowed the peppermint plant to spread its roots deep into the heart of Soviet Russia and collapse communism from the inside. The Chinese commie basta.. government reacted by building a Great Wall to keep the peppermint out of their gardens.
==Peppermint and the War on Tourism==
In the early nineties, the United States made several attempts to use peppermint in their fight against Tourism, a new global threat first discovered by Dutch bounty hunters Bassie en Adriaan and gaining power in the Middle East. It was soon claimed, however, that the tourist nation of Iraq (led by the disturbingly striking Stalin-lookalike Saddam Hussein) had developed a peppermint antidote. This led to the Persian Gulf War and lots of tutting. In a culmination of events, the US government decided to start an all-out War on Tourism. The justification for this war was eventually established by having the CIA fly two planes into the World Trade centre in Manhattan. Originally intended as a means to kill off illegal criminals in Harlem, the government now blamed this event on Tourism and launched a full-scale attack on all nations who were said to possess peppermint antidote. Although since the start of the attack several nations have been successfully trampled and others have again allowed peppermint inspection parties into their chemical plants, to this date no traces of actual peppermint antidote have been found.
category:food
category:biochemistry