NEWTON'S LAW: ARTICHOKES, TAKE HEART! THE LAW MAY SOON BE ON YOUR SIDE

What hath Meryl Streep wrought?

Aside from being one of America's most accomplished film actresses and founding member of the "Accent of the Month Club," Streep has fostered enough agricultural paranoia to fertilize legislation from Tallahassee to Juneau.

Gosh, and we just thought she was off her game in "She-Devil."

Here's how you become the scourge of an industry. Meryl Streep is an apple eater of some note, a fact normally not included in her studio biography. At some point, she discovered the apples she ingested, and those she thrust upon her kids, lacked worms that spoil the product and make such cute cameos on television cartoons.

Incensed by this worm absence, or perhaps for having been shut out of Oscars since "Sophie's Choice," she took her case to Congress and the national news media, entities that always seem primed to be taken.

Actresses tend to know less about agricultural issues than a typical animal husbandry major at a land-grant university. Still, when movie types sit down before congressional committees, it is as though the deity has come to visit a backsliding Christian. Everybody gets a little goofy.

When they heard she would be speaking in her real voice, and not that of Baroness Blixen, the camera people really got cranked up.

What happened next the apple growers of America would as soon forget. Before you could say melodrama, America's greatest known apple eater of the moment confessed that she didn't fancy the taste of Alar.

Streep didn't say that she preferred her children to eat worms. She just said that pesticide was not her favorite flavor.

The apple industry insists that it suffered immediate and substantial harm from this testimony. Rebuttals about the systematic discouragement of worms lacked impact because ... well, because no one with Meryl Streep's glamour was available to recite them.

Thanks to one day on Capitol Hill and a tour of the morning news shows, an actress became the greatest fruit expert since Johnny Appleseed.

Lawmakers are like car makers in that both believe the more they produce, the greater their prosperity. Car makers can at least make a case for this.

While the Alar scare of 1989 proved to be more a media/public relations/societal fiasco, some legislators have found it valuable to beat on their chests and proclaim "it shall never happen again," as if stopping an ocean wave with a sand bucket were suddenly deemed possible.

One such movement is afoot in Colorado, where the House of Representatives last month passed a bill prohibiting anyone from making disparaging remarks about "perishable fruit, vegetables and dairy products." It comes up for its first Senate vote Friday.

In that great snow-capped state, never shall be heard a discouraging word (about broccoli).

Artichokes, take heart. Celery, you will no longer be stalked. Asparagus, take a tip from your saviors in the Denver statehouse. No longer will you be subject to the ridicule of carnivores. It's not easy being greens ... but Colorado lawmakers are doing their best to help.

And what of those people who break the law, who deliberately let fly some slur about Brussels sprouts? What if you brazenly grimace while squeezing an eggplant at the produce counter?

You might be hauled away by the Veggie Police. They take you to an indoctrination facility where they show you films like "Cauliflower is Your Friend" and teach you to do wonderful things with Hollandaise sauce.

Is there anything more dangerous than lawmakers taking the law into their own hands?

This used to be a nice country to live in before Meryl Streep and her ilk stirred things up.