Fat. It’s What’s For Breakfast.

So I was checking my email this weekend when a banner ad caught my attention: “Next time fight the morning fade™ with Jimmy Dean sausage.” It was accompanied by an image of a sausage and egg biscuit at the center of a rural sunrise, with yellow and orange rays twirling around this sausage thing as if it were a fat, wrinkly, radiant Christ child in some Italian Renaissance painting of the Madonna—or one that had been shoved by Satan into a little girl’s bicycle spokes.

Having no idea what “the morning fade” is supposed to be, other than getting stoned before breakfast, I did a little research. As I discovered, Jimmy Dean conducted a “nationwide survey” to identify cities where people “become groggy, anxious and more focused on what’s for lunch rather than the task at hand.” Apparently the cure for this condition is sausage—which explains the recent and sudden demand for sausage-flavored energy drinks.

Jimmy Dean claims that nearly half of the people in cities such as Orlando, San Antonio, Denver, and Indianapolis begin to crave lunch before 10 a.m. (italics added). And as we all know, hunger causes sleepiness. The response to the public service videos Jimmy Dean has placed on YouTube indicates the severity of this problem. For example, since being posted on September 17, this video has received almost 330 views. Clearly, the problem has gone viral.

I particularly enjoy the way this clip combines the hand-held urgency of The Blair Witch Project with the primal dread of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds and the mechanistic fatefulness of the Final Destination series (in the form of the honking truck).

In case you were wondering just how much caffeine can be found in sausage, here are the nutrition facts for a Jimmy Dean sausage, egg, and cheese croissant:

I’m disappointed that the alcohol content is so low. However, this can easily be rectified by removing the sausage patty from the Jimmy Dean croissant, rolling it into a cylindrical shape, and shoving it down the throat of a beer bottle. Place your thumb over the bottle and shake until sausage dissolution has been achieved. When the morning fade hits you at 10AM, drink this concoction, and we guarantee that the combination of calories, fat, and alcohol will provide an energy boost that carries you all the way through into the evening.