Pass the Salt : The Great Popcorn Scare Fails to Break Habit of Matinee Crowd

She was heedless, raffish. You could almost smell it on her--that air of . . . of . . . hot buttered popcorn at the movie matinee.

The actress tossed her famous black hair, grabbed her preschooler’s tiny hand and swept into an afternoon showing of “Monkey Trouble” at the Beverly Center Cineplex Odeon with the saturated-fat-equivalent of 15 hot dogs under her arm.

“Yes, I know,” spat Theresa Saldana with a devil-may-care laugh. “And I plan on enjoying every kernel.”

Perhaps you, too, have heard it by now--the announcement this week that movie theater popcorn can be hazardous to your health. According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, most theaters still pop their kernels with artery-clogging coconut oil--a method that lards movie popcorn with so much saturated fat that a medium plain popcorn is actually twice as fatty as a Big Mac meal, including fries.

And that’s just the popcorn without butter.

But at the Beverly Center on Tuesday, the matinee crowd was laughing in the face of obesity. This may be no big deal in, say, Minneapolis, but in Los Angeles, cottage cheese thighs are nothing to snicker about. This, in short, was news. But they took it in stride.

“Aw,” philosophized Valerie Armstrong, nursing a medium buttered popcorn, “there are so damn few things you can enjoy in life. I plan on enjoying this.”

Giggling guiltily, she grabbed a handful of the greasy yellow stuff and knocked back a steaming kernel or two. There were approximately 11 cups worth of popcorn in her bag-o’-death, with almost as much saturated fat as a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac, a large fries and a steak dinner with all the trimmings--combined.

Then she reconsidered, turned on her heel, and dumped about a quarter-cup of salt on top.

“I like to live on the edge,” she explained.

Some were in denial.

“Don’t! Don’t tell me anything about this popcorn that I don’t want to hear,” begged Paulette McNeely as her toddler niece and her nephew crammed fat little fistfuls into their happy mouths.

Others expressed shock and vowed they would change, but it was clear their dependency had gone too far.

“So they’ve been lying to us,” muttered 23-year-old actress Dru Mouser, obviously embittered. “Like everyone. Like the cigarette industry!”

Obviously in shock, she stared into space, absently reaching into her red-and-yellow sack for a steaming handful of hot buttered betrayal.

Indeed, it was the rare customer who was avoiding popcorn, even in the wake of this week’s report. In fact, only one person out of perhaps 20 in a random moviegoer-in-the-refreshment-line survey was refusing even to consider such a snack, and that was the concessionaire working in front of the radiant, chrome-and-glass popcorn machine. (It turns out you feel a lot less friendly toward the stuff when you come home smelling like it night after night.)

But Fevrile Cohen, a 23-year-old makeup artist heading in to see “Backbeat,” said she may start smuggling her own, homemade, popcorn into her matinees.

Obviously, she had not heard about the FDA studies three years ago, indicating that those little browning strips in some brands of microwaveable popcorn contain traces of cancer-causing benzene.