Vast amounts of mayonnaise continue to spill into Lake Michigan after an explosion at the Kraft Foods factory blasted a hole in a pipeline used to manufacture the sandwich spread.

NORTHFIELD, IL — Vast amounts of mayonnaise continue to spill into Lake Michigan after an explosion at the Kraft Foods factory blasted a hole in a pipeline used to manufacture the sandwich spread. Experts have estimated the greasy white dressing is spewing into the water at the rate of 700,000 jars per day.

Hundreds of egrets, blue herons and cranes that make their homes in and around the lake have been immobilized on the shores, their feathers completely drenched with the tasty blend of emulsified vegetable oil and egg yolks.

Environmentalists are working around the clock to save the birds, painstakingly cleaning each feather before releasing the fouls back into the wild. The task is arduous and exhausting. “You ever try wiping mayo off a piece of bread?” asked Thomas Loungerelle, a volunteer with the Audubon Society. “That’s kind of what we’re doing, only the bread is really nasty smelling and you gotta wear gloves ’cause you might catch a horrible disease or something…”

In a press conference, President Obama called the spill an “environmental catastrophe.”

“We all agree on the need to break our mayonnaise dependency from countries such as Japan, Germany and Holland, and find new sources of the delicious, creamy sauce here at home,” said the President, “but we must do it in a responsible manner, and not at the expense of destroying our environment.”

A spokesperson for Kraft said his company is using all its resources to prevent the mayo from spreading further, including stocking the lake with thousands of tuna fish.

“We’re hoping the tuna will absorb the mayonnaise,” explained Vice President Myron Kepplehorn. “If it works — aside from creating some very fat fish — everything should get back to normal in a matter of weeks — that is, if we can figure out where all this mayonnaise is coming from and how to stop it.”

Obama called the response from the food giant “woefully insufficient,” and said he will be creating a new position of Condiment Czar to find out what went wrong and prevent such mishaps in the future.

“I have asked Congress to remove mayonnaise oversight from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms,” he said, “and put it into the hands of someone more experienced in these types of investigations.”

That “experienced someone” is none other than lame-duck Senator Arlen Specter, who the President has appointed to run the new department.

Specter — who achieved notoriety in the 1960s for devising the “single-bullet theory” to explain how one lone gunman could fire six shots from three different directions within five seconds to kill the hopes and dreams of 250 million Americans — has already reached some startling conclusions.

The five-term senator announced that while much of the public believes Hellman’s and Best Foods are two completely different mayonnaises, he has successfully determined that they are “one and the same product.”

“And hopefully,” he added, “we’ll figure out what the hell Miracle Whip is.”