Planning on making and decorating Christmas cookies today, and was reminded once more how I haven't seen those little silver ball sprinkles in stores in a long, long time. I don't even know why or when it first occurred to me to look for them, but over the last couple of years a cursory peek through the cake-decorating sections of local craft stores has been unfruitful. So today I looked 'em up.

Whattaya know. They have a name. Silver dragees - it's french; there should be a little accent mark over the "e", but whatever.

And what else do you know. The reason I can't find them is because some (surprise!) environmental lawyer in (surprise!) California sued the companies making and selling them, citing the toxicity of silver. He made a bundle, of course, since the companies gave up and settled rather than deal with the hassle and court fees. This in spite of the fact that we consume minute amounts of silver in our diet daily, people have been eating these sprinkles (and silver leaf, as well) in fancy desserts for like a century without ill effect, and you would have to consume probably all the dragees in France to risk poisoning yourself with it.

They're actually banned in California. Poor, poor California. You can supposedly still buy them in the rest of the 49, but the FDA has ordered that manufacturers label them as "not a food item - remove before consuming" or some such nonsense that nobody follows. Still, they are all but impossible to find.

So thank you, Napa attorney Mark Pollock, you greedy, joy-snatching, fearmongering Scrooge. Thank you for making sure the poor idiotic Americans don't poison themselves on a product that nobody was poisoning themselves on to begin with. I'm sure it makes you sleep better.

Friggin' grinch.