We Are All Going to Die
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FDA orders widespread food recall. (MSNBC)
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced a recall of a common flavor enhancer that could be contaminated with salmonella bacteria.
The product, called hydrolyzed vegetable protein or HVP, is potentially in thousands of food products, including soups, sauces, chilis, stews, hot dogs, gravies, seasoned snack foods, dips and dressings. HVP is manufactured by a Las Vegas company.
All HVP in the world is manufactured by one company? In Las Vegas?
Packaged Salad Bacteria: New Study Finds Salad Can Contain High Levels of Fecal Bacteria. (Huff Post)
Literally.
How safe is that chicken? (Consumer Reports)
You would think that after years of alarms about food safety—outbreaks of illness followed by renewed efforts at cleanup—a staple like chicken would be a lot safer to eat. But in our latest analysis of fresh, whole broilers bought at stores nationwide, two-thirds harbored salmonella and/or campylobacter, the leading bacterial causes of foodborne disease.
Meat is murder on the environment. (New Scientist)
A kilogram of beef is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution than driving for 3 hours while leaving all the lights on back home.
This is among the conclusions of a study by Akifumi Ogino of the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Tsukuba, Japan, and colleagues, which has assessed the effects of beef production on global warming, water acidification and eutrophication, and energy consumption. The team looked at calf production, focusing on animal management and the effects of producing and transporting feed. By combining this information with data from their earlier studies on the impact of beef fattening systems, the researchers were able to calculate the total environmental load of a portion of beef.
Their analysis showed that producing a kilogram of beef leads to the emission of greenhouse gases with a warming potential equivalent to 36.4 kilograms of carbon dioxide. It also releases fertilising compounds equivalent to 340 grams of sulphur dioxide and 59 grams of phosphate, and consumes 169 megajoules of energy (Animal Science Journal, DOI: 10.1111/j.1740-0929.2007.00457.x). In other words, a kilogram of beef is responsible for the equivalent of the amount of CO2 emitted by the average European car every 250 kilometres, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.
The calculations, which are based on standard industrial methods of meat production in Japan, did not include the impact of managing farm infrastructure and transporting the meat, so the total environmental load is higher than the study suggests.
Big Food vs. Big Insurance . (Pollan in the NY Times)
No one disputes that the $2.3 trillion we devote to the health care industry is often spent unwisely, but the fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. Even the most efficient health care system that the administration could hope to devise would still confront a rising tide of chronic disease linked to diet.
That’s why our success in bringing health care costs under control ultimately depends on whether Washington can summon the political will to take on and reform a second, even more powerful industry: the food industry.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three-quarters of health care spending now goes to treat “preventable chronic diseases.” Not all of these diseases are linked to diet — there’s smoking, for instance — but many, if not most, of them are.
We’re spending $147 billion to treat obesity, $116 billion to treat diabetes, and hundreds of billions more to treat cardiovascular disease and the many types of cancer that have been linked to the so-called Western diet. One recent study estimated that 30 percent of the increase in health care spending over the past 20 years could be attributed to the soaring rate of obesity, a condition that now accounts for nearly a tenth of all spending on health care.
My on-again, off-again, on-again boycott of Whole Foods IS BACK IN THE SADDLE, BITCHES.
The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare. (Wall Street Journal)
Personal responsibility…blah blah…people are to blame for not having health care…blah blah…socialezm is teh evil…blah blah…people should buy $1 kumquats at my store if they want to live to be 100.
Fuck John Mackey, who is the world’s most notorious sockpuppet. I’m surprised he didn’t simply byline this op-ed with “I Hump Ayn Rand’s Rotting Corpse.”
Hot dogs should carry a warning label, lawsuit says. (LA Times, via PAC@theMerc)
The nonprofit Cancer Project filed a lawsuit today on behalf of three New Jersey plaintiffs asking the Essex County superior court to compel the companies to place cancer-risk warning labels on hot dog packages sold in New Jersey.
“Just as tobacco causes lung cancer, processed meats are linked to colon cancer,” says Neal Barnard, president of the Cancer Project and an adjunct professor at the George Washington University medical school in Washington, D.C. “Companies that sell hot dogs are well aware of the danger, and their customers deserve the same information.”
The defendants in the lawsuit, which seeks class-action status, include Nathan’s Famous Inc., Oscar Mayer-owner Kraft Foods Inc., Sara Lee Corp., Marathon Enterprises Inc. and ConAgra Foods Inc., which owns Hebrew National.
I’d be fine with this, as long as they aired a disclaimer before reality television shows that warns potential viewers that watching the program will make you stupid.
Why junk food really is addictive. (Telegraph UK)
Professor Kessler, ex-commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), claims that manufacturers have created combinations of fat, sugar and salt that are so tasty many people cannot stop eating them even when full.
He argues that manufacturers are seeking to trigger a “bliss point” when people eat certain products, leaving them hungry for more.
“It is time to stop blaming individuals for being overweight or obese,” he said. “The real problem is we have created a world where food is always available and where that food is designed to make you want to eat more of it. For millions of people, modern food is simply impossible to resist.”
While at the FDA, Prof Kessler was well known for his criticism of the tobacco industry, which he accused of manipulating cigarettes to make them even more addictive.
The same can be said about porn.
Waiter, There’s Deer in My Sushi. (NY Times)
Sushi made with deer meat, anyone? How about a slice of raw horse on that rice?
These are some of the most extreme alternatives being considered by Japanese chefs as shortages of tuna threaten to remove it from Japan’s sushi menus — something as unthinkable here as baseball without hot dogs or Texas without barbecue.
In this seafood-crazed country, tuna is king. From maguro to otoro, the Japanese seem to have almost as many words for tuna and its edible parts as the French have names for cheese. So when global fishing bodies recently began lowering the limits on catches in the world’s rapidly depleting tuna fisheries, Japan fell into a national panic.
Nightly news programs ran in-depth reports of how higher prices were driving top-grade tuna off supermarket shelves and the revolving conveyer belts at sushi chain stores. At nicer restaurants, sushi chefs began experimenting with substitutes, from cheaper varieties of fish to terrestrial alternatives and even, heaven forbid, American sushi variations like avocado rolls.
“It’s like America running out of steak,” said Tadashi Yamagata, vice chairman of Japan’s national union of sushi chefs. “Sushi without tuna just would not be sushi.”
I’m pretty sure if you stuck cream cheese in it and called it a “Bambi Roll” or a “Seabiscuit Maki” all the fucking retards in Scottsdale (or the Pearl) would buy it.
Oysters in deep trouble: Is Pacific Ocean’s chemistry killing sea life? (Seattle Times)
In a region that provides one-sixth of the nation’s oysters — the epicenter of the West Coast’s $111 million oyster industry — everyone knows nature can be fickle.
But then the failure was repeated in 2006, 2007 and 2008. It spread to an Oregon hatchery that supplies baby oysters to shellfish nurseries from Puget Sound to Los Angeles. Eighty percent of that hatchery’s oyster larvae died, too.
Now, as the oyster industry heads into the fifth summer of its most unnerving crisis in decades, scientists are pondering a disturbing theory. They suspect water that rises from deep in the Pacific Ocean — icy seawater that surges into Willapa Bay and gets pumped into seaside hatcheries — may be corrosive enough to kill baby oysters.
If true, that could mean shifts in ocean chemistry associated with carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil fuels may be impairing sea life faster and more dramatically than expected.
The Pork Lobbyists, Ready to Reassure. (Washington Post)
For going on two weeks, the Washington professionals who represent the nation’s 67,000 pork producers have been in a mad dash to, as President Obama once said, put lipstick on this pig. Hundreds of people have been infected in more than a dozen countries, prompting the closure of scores of schools across the United States, including four in the Washington region.
In Canada over the weekend, officials said a farmworker passed the virus to a herd of hogs. Although the farmer and the pigs apparently have recovered, and top U.S. and Mexican officials yesterday projected a cautious optimism that the new virus is not as lethal as initially feared, intense worldwide focus on swine flu shows no signs of abating.
Each morning, the pork lobbyists assemble to figure out how bad it got overnight. On this day last week, word came that officials in Egypt had ordered the slaughter of every pig in sight — about 300,000 of them. In Iowa, the first two possible cases of swine flu were reported, and the Russians and Chinese were considering banning pork imports from that Midwestern state, America’s biggest hog producer. On CNN, a news anchor teased an upcoming flu segment with footage of dead pigs.
“Worried about the swine flu?” the anchor asked. “Well, it could be worse. You could be a pig farmer.”
The swine flu crisis lays bare the meat industry’s monstrous power. (Guardian UK)
But what caused this acceleration of swine flu evolution? Virologists have long believed that the intensive agricultural system of southern China is the principal engine of influenza mutation: both seasonal “drift” and episodic genomic “shift”. But the corporate industrialisation of livestock production has broken China’s natural monopoly on influenza evolution. Animal husbandry in recent decades has been transformed into something that more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm depicted in school readers.
In 1965, for instance, there were 53m US hogs on more than 1m farms; today, 65m hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities. This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.
Swine-flu outbreak could be linked to Smithfield factory farms. (Grist)
The outbreak of a new flu strain—a nasty mash-up of swine, avian, and human viruses—has infected 1,000 people in Mexico and the U.S., killing 68. The World Health Organization warned Saturday that the outbreak could reach global pandemic levels.
Is Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork packer and hog producer, linked to the outbreak? Smithfield operates massive hog-raising operations Perote, Mexico, in the state of Vera Cruz, where the outbreak originated. The operations, grouped under a Smithfield subsidiary called Granjas Carroll, raise 950,000 hogs per year, according to the company Web site.
100 sickened after eating at N.Y. Applebee’s. (AP via MSNBC)
SYRACUSE, N.Y. – Health officials say more than 100 people reported getting sick after eating at an Applebee’s restaurant near Syracuse.
The county health department says there are seven confirmed cases of Shigellosis among people who ate at the Applebee’s in Camillus in early March. The bacterial infection is associated with consuming water or food contaminated with fecal matter.
I’m sure there’s a joke about Guy Fieri somewhere in there, but I just don’t have the spirit.
World’s Deadliest Spider Found In Whole Foods In Tulsa. (Huff Post)
TULSA, Okla. — One of the most deadly spiders in the world has been found in the produce section of a Tulsa grocery store. An employee of Whole Foods Market found the Brazilian Wandering Spider Sunday in bananas from Honduras and managed to catch it in a container.
The spider was given to University of Tulsa Animal Facilities director Terry Childs who said this type of spider kills more people than any other.
Childs said a bite will kill a person in about 25 minutes and while there is an antidote he doesn’t know of any in the Tulsa area.
I kinda like spiders, so my on-again/off-again boycott of Whole Foods is, for the time being, OFF.
FDA Approves Salmonella. (America’s Finest News Source)
WASHINGTON—Calling it “perfectly safe for the most part,” and “not nearly as destructive or fatal as previously thought,” the Food and Drug Administration approved the enterobacteria salmonella for human consumption this week.
The federal agency, which has struggled in recent years to contain the food-borne pathogen, and repeatedly failed to prevent tainted products from reaching store shelves, announced Monday that salmonella was now completely okay for all Americans to enjoy.
“Rigorous testing has shown that salmonella is…fine,” FDA director of food safety Stephen Sundlof said. “In fact, our research indicates that there’s no need to pull any more foodstuffs from the market. Not raw chicken. Not contaminated spinach. Not thousands of jars of harmful peanut butter. Not anything.”
The Maggots in Your Mushrooms. (NY Times Op-Ed)
Tomato juice, for example, may average “10 or more fly eggs per 100 grams [the equivalent of a small juice glass] or five or more fly eggs and one or more maggots.” Tomato paste and other pizza sauces are allowed a denser infestation — 30 or more fly eggs per 100 grams or 15 or more fly eggs and one or more maggots per 100 grams.
Canned mushrooms may have “over 20 or more maggots of any size per 100 grams of drained mushrooms and proportionate liquid” or “five or more maggots two millimeters or longer per 100 grams of drained mushrooms and proportionate liquid” or an “average of 75 mites” before provoking action by the F.D.A.
The sauerkraut on your hot dog may average up to 50 thrips. And when washing down those tiny, slender, winged bugs with a sip of beer, you might consider that just 10 grams of hops could have as many as 2,500 plant lice. Yum.
Consumers urged to use caution eating peanut butter. (CNN)
Federal officials are urging consumers to put off eating foods that contain peanut butter until they can be they are sure they do not contain products manufactured by the Peanut Corp. of America, some of which were found to contain salmonella.
I’ve been slowly going through a small package of Nabisco brand Nutter Butter Sandwich Cookies all week. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
IKEA sells this wood treatment for its kitchen butcher block.
IKEA tells me it’s approved for use on surfaces that come in contact with food.
As if Things Weren’t Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S.. (WSJ)
“There’s a 55-45% chance right now that disintegration will occur,” he says. “One could rejoice in that process,” he adds, poker-faced. “But if we’re talking reasonably, it’s not the best scenario — for Russia.” Though Russia would become more powerful on the global stage, he says, its economy would suffer because it currently depends heavily on the dollar and on trade with the U.S.
Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces — with Alaska reverting to Russian control.
The 20 Unhealthiest Drinks in America. (Men’s Health, ht Amanda @PF.org)
1. The Worst Drink in America
Baskin-Robbins Large Heath Bar Shake2,310 calories
108 g fat (64 g saturated)
266 g
That’s nothing compared to a holiday tradition in our household: bacon-n-eggnog lard shakes, encased in a 5-inch corn syrup brulee crust and topped with fried cow brains and rocks of crystal methamphetamine.
Depression 2009: What would it look like? (Boston Herald)
And while very few would starve, a depression would change how we eat. Food costs remain far below what they were for a family in the 1920s and 1930s, but they have been rising in recent years, and many people already on the edge of poverty would be unable to feed themselves on their own in a harsh economic climate – soup kitchens are already seeing an uptick in attendance. At the high end of the market, specialty and organic foods – which drove the success of chains like Whole Foods – would seem pointlessly expensive; the booming organic food movement could suffer as people start to see specially grown produce as more of a luxury than a moral choice. New England’s surviving farmers would be particularly hard-hit, as demand for their seasonal, relatively high-cost products dried up.
According to Marion Nestle, a food and public health professor at New York University, people low on cash and with more time on their hands will cook more rather than go out. They may also, Nestle suggests, try their hands at growing and even raising more of their own food, if they have any way of doing so. Among the green lawns of suburbia, kitchen gardens would spring up. And it might go well beyond just growing your own tomatoes: early last month, the English bookstore chain Waterstone’s reported a 200 percent increase in the sales of books on keeping chickens.
At the same time, the cheapest option for many is decidedly less rustic: meals like packaged macaroni and cheese and drive-through fast food. And we’re likely to see a move in that direction, as well, toward cheaper, easier calories. If so, lean times could have the odd effect of making the population fatter, as more Americans eat like today’s poor.
In Europe, crisis revives old memories. (IHT)
“I haven’t forgotten history,” says Gert Heinz, a tax adviser in Munich. “If you depend on paper money you can lose everything. We’ve learned that the hard way after two world wars.”
So when Chancellor Angela Merkel went on television recently to tell Germans that their bank accounts were safe, Heinz, who at 68 still remembers the rows of canned food that his mother hoarded in the attic, decided he would rather be safe than sorry.
He converted another chunk of his savings into gold and stocked up on a six-month supply of rice, sugar, flour and a special brand of milk powder that lasts for half a century.
FDA: Tiny bit of melamine OK in most foods.
Tiny traces of melamine, the chemical that has set off a global food safety scare, are not harmful in most foods, except baby formula, government experts said Friday.
The Food and Drug Administration said Friday its safety experts have concluded that eating a minuscule amount of melamine — 2.5 parts per million — would not raise health concerns, even if a person ate food every day that was tainted with the chemical.
“It would be like if you had a million grains of sand and they were all white, and you had two or three that were black, that’s kind of the magnitude,” said Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA’s food safety program.
I suppose the same can be said about shit.
Cadbury pulls melamine-laced chocolate from China. (AP/Yahoo! News)
British candy maker Cadbury announced a recall Monday of chocolate made in its Beijing factory after it was found to contain melamine, the industrial chemical that has sickened tens of thousands of Chinese children.
The 11 recalled items were sold in parts of Asia and the Pacific, the company said in a statement. Cadbury’s chocolates sold in the United States were not affected, said a spokesman for Hershey’s, Cadbury’s sole U.S. distributor.
Meanwhile, Kraft Foods, the maker of Oreo cookies, and Mars, the maker of M&Ms and Snickers candy, questioned the findings of Indonesian tests that identified melamine in samples of their products made in China.
Sounds delicious.
What the fuck is “spicy lava sauce“?
The McRib has returned. May God have mercy on our souls.
Food Costs Feed Health Woes. (WSJ)
Relief from the rising cost of food isn’t expected anytime soon. Food prices increased 4% in 2007 and are expected to be up an additional 5% to 6% this year, according to the Department of Agriculture. The food crisis has sparked riots around the world and stretched pocketbooks at home, but it is for some as much a health concern as an economic problem. Since healthier foods, like whole-wheat bread and fresh fruits, are already more expensive than white bread and processed foods, the increases are acutely felt by people trying to fight serious illnesses.
WORLD’S DEADLIEST DELICACIES. (Forbes Traveler)
Italy: Casu Marzu
One of the world’s few illegal cheeses, Casu Marzu looks scary, has an almost un-acquirable taste and may have catastrophic, long-term health results. The Sardinian delicacy is made from rotten goat’s milk and served coursing with live maggots. If you can handle the idea and tactile sensation of eating live larvae, you’re rewarded with a strong sour taste that can reportedly stay with you all day. Unfortunately, the human body has difficulty processing maggots, and in some extreme cases the little guys bore through the small intestine, causing bleeding, vomiting and other cheerful moments.
However, the most surprising entry? Jack-in-the-Box’s E. Coli Milkshake.
Burger King Profits Rise 42 Percent As Consumers Stuff Their Nervous Faces. (Huffington Post)
Burger King Holdings Inc., the nation’s No. 2 hamburger chain, said Thursday its profit surged 42 percent in its fiscal fourth quarter, driven by a rise in sales at established locations and a slew of promotions.
Broccoli may undo diabetes damage. (BBC)
Eating broccoli could reverse the damage caused by diabetes to heart blood vessels, research suggests.
A University of Warwick team believe the key is a compound found in the vegetable, called sulforaphane.
It encourages production of enzymes which protect the blood vessels, and a reduction in high levels of molecules which cause significant cell damage.
Brassica vegetables such as broccoli have previously been linked to a lower risk of heart attacks and strokes.
Whole Foods recalling possibly contaminated beef. (Associated Press)
Whole Foods Market is recalling fresh ground beef sold between June 2 through Aug. 6 because the beef might be contaminated with E. coli bacteria.
The company has received reports that seven people in Massachusetts and two people in Pennsylvania who shopped at Whole Foods Market became ill, said spokeswoman Libba Letton.
Letton said the company’s recalled beef was processed at the Nebraska Beef plant linked to the E. coli outbreak this summer. Federal health authorities say there have been 49 confirmed illnesses tied to that outbreak.
I’ll take it! This harkens back to when E. coli was associated only with the consumption of meat, instead of now when it could be spinach or tomatoes or jalapenos or mustard packets or napkins. The salad days.
California becomes first state to ban trans fats. (IHT)
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California signed a bill banning trans fats in restaurant food, making California the first U.S. state to ban the use of the cooking oils linked to artery-clogging cholesterol.
The new law, modeled after a ban implemented in New York City, prohibits the use of partially hydrogenated oils, which contain trans fats, by the state’s 87,000 restaurants beginning in 2010 and in all baked goods sold in the state starting in 2011.
Now if they could only also ban Jingle All the Way.
AP: Food industry bitten by its lobbying success (AP/Yahoo! News)
One of the worst outbreaks of foodborne illness in the U.S. is teaching the food industry the truth of the adage, “Be careful what you wish for because you might get it.”
The industry pressured the Bush administration years ago to limit the paperwork companies would have to keep to help U.S. health investigators quickly trace produce that sickens consumers, according to interviews and government reports reviewed by The Associated Press.
The White House also killed a plan to require the industry to maintain electronic tracking records that could be reviewed easily during a crisis to search for an outbreak’s source. Companies complained the proposals were too burdensome and costly, and warned they could disrupt the availability of consumers’ favorite foods.
The apparent but unintended consequences of the lobbying success: a paper record-keeping system that has slowed investigators, with estimated business losses of $250 million. So far, nearly 1,300 people in 43 states, the District of Columbia and Canada have been sickened by salmonella since April.
Men’s Health blesses the fried pig skin–booze–jerky–sour cream–coconut–chocolate hexagonal snack cadre. I usually eat all of those, in one dish. For breakfast.
Salmonella signs point to peppers. (Baltimore Sun)
Investigators are seeing more signs that the salmonella outbreak blamed on tomatoes might have been caused by tainted jalapeno peppers and have begun collecting samples from restaurants and from the homes of those who have been sickened, according to health officials involved in the probe.
While on a late-night grocery run, after watching the Lakers lay a brick in Game 6 against the Boston Celtics, I got that cheap, tawdry urge that can only be sated by fast food or paying a hermaphrodite for sex. However, I am a weird person in that I need tomatoes on my fast food. In fact, I always tend to ask for extra tomatoes.
I first stopped by Burger King, as I read some news release that BK had returned tomatoes to their menu items, including their popular Whopper™ sandwich. However, the lady behind the counter took an almost exculpatory glee in denying my tomato request, as they indeed did not have tomatoes in the kitchen.
Next was McDonald’s, with the same negative result. Arby’s had their disclaimer plastered on the door of the restaurant, so I didn’t even have to go in.
Taco Bell, however, had tomatoes.
So there you go. Taco Bell, I may not again grace your sterile environs for some time, but don’t take it personally, as I have a newfound respect for you. Yes, your ground meat appears to have been extracted from an industrial barrel-sized can, and close to 43% of the ingredients of your 7-Layer Burrito may not actually exist in any natural state, but when I look back on the Spring of 2008, the Season of the Great Tomato Scare, of $4/gas, of the epochal $5 Submarine Sandwich War, I will always think fondly of Taco Bell, my very own transgender hooker.
Lawmakers subpoena 9 food testing companies. (MSNBC)
Lawmakers voted Thursday to subpoena nine companies responsible for analyzing the most dangerous food entering the country as part of an investigation that gained more urgency with an outbreak of salmonella from tomatoes.
…
Stupak said nine of 10 companies declined to submit information voluntarily out of concern that the food import companies that hire them would then sue them for breaching confidentiality agreements. The records sought related to testing of food found not to meet FDA standards for import into the U.S.
Another “free” market success story.
Today for lunch I had a roast turkey sandwich with sliced tomatoes from a round fruit that to my knowledge was not vine-ripened and did not hail from California, Tennessee, Israel, or the Netherlands. I used half of the tomato, and chopped the rest for an afternoon-snack salad.
I’m monitoring the situation and I’ll post to this blog tomorrow if I die.
It’s becoming increasingly more difficult to parody shit these days. (Link to some batshit insane woman who fashions herself an Ayn Rand-ian deep thinker).
Government asks court to block wider testing for mad cow. (AP/Yahoo! News)
The Bush administration on Friday urged a federal appeals court to stop meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease, but a skeptical judge questioned whether the government has that authority.
All salmon fishing banned on West Coast.
Salmon fishing was banned along the West Coast for the first time in 160 years Thursday, a decision that is expected to have a devastating economic impact on fishermen, dozens of businesses, tourism and boating.
Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez immediately declared a commercial fishery disaster, opening the door for Congress to appropriate money for anyone who will be economically harmed.
The closure of commercial and recreational fishing for chinook salmon in the ocean off California and most of Oregon was announced by the National Marine Fishery Service.
It followed the recommendation last month of the Pacific Fishery Management Council after the catastrophic disappearance of California’s fabled fall run of the pink fish popularly known as king salmon.
It is the first total closure since commercial fishing started in the Bay Area in 1848.
A Drought in Australia, a Global Shortage of Rice. (NY Times)
DENILIQUIN, Australia — Lindsay Renwick, the mayor of this dusty southern Australian town, remembers the constant whir of the rice mill. “It was our little heartbeat out there, tickety-tick-tickety,” he said, imitating the giant fans that dried the rice, “and now it has stopped.”
The Deniliquin mill, the largest rice mill in the Southern Hemisphere, once processed enough grain to meet the needs of 20 million people around the world. But six long years of drought have taken a toll, reducing Australia’s rice crop by 98 percent and leading to the mothballing of the mill last December.
…
The collapse of Australia’s rice production is one of several factors contributing to a doubling of rice prices in the last three months — increases that have led the world’s largest exporters to restrict exports severely, spurred panicked hoarding in Hong Kong and the Philippines, and set off violent protests in countries including Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia, Italy, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, the Philippines, Thailand, Uzbekistan and Yemen.
Does this affect you? Do you care?
Here in the U.S., the cost of food has been rising exponentially as we’ve foolishly hitched our wagons (literally) to ethanol. Crops that were once staples in the food cycle, such as corn, are being used to produce fuel in a zero-sum game, and the results are riots in Mexico over the price of tortillas.
A common trope repeated by armchair chaos theorists is that when a butterfly bats its wings, a hurricane can result halfway across the world. However, this appears to be happening at a macro scale in our own country, as rising prices affect everything from eggs to beer.
- Surging costs of groceries hit home
- Grand Rapids-area bakeries hit by rising flour prices
- Rising flour prices send pizzerias scrambling
- Beer Prices Rising Amid Crop Shortage
Working-class Americans are increasingly bearing the brunt of these increased costs (“Middle class Long Islanders turning to food pantries”) as rising wholesale prices are feeding an alarming, worldwide inflationary spike.
We are experiencing a perfect storm, as energy and fuel prices climb, the world’s shaky financial markets continue to deteriorate as a result of greed and malfeasance, and a maturing world population has pushed grain demand to levels unseen. A growing, foreign middle class are patterning their lifestyles much in the way we Americans have been living for decades. This burgeoning affluence has pushed demand for fuel and energy to an all-time high, and millions of middle-class Chinese with a newfound taste for meat are helping to feed a vicious cycle which usurps grain stores at exponential rate (to serve as livestock feed) and burns the massive amounts of fuel necessary to sustain this consumption.
Food riots are breaking out all across the world, which leads to food protectionism as foreign countries limit exports to mitigate domestic upheaval. History indicates (“Rice Riots of 1918”) rising food prices, particularly grain, can be a bellwether from which to gauge growing societal entropy. Just last month, the price of rice in Asia surged 30% in a single day.
The lack of deference to this subject paid by the American mainstream media is disgusting, but hardly surprising. The questions are too myriad to attempt to cogently address, and our current clueless cadre of politicians are hopelessly inept, more concerned with American flag lapel pins and justifying 100 years of troop presence in an area of the world that will soon be ground zero for the entropic decay associated with the eventual end of cheap energy.
With that in mind, Tommy@Macerating Shallots has tagged me for a six word memoir meme. 66.67% of my memoir I will directly rip off from William Butler Yeats:
“The centre cannot hold: we’re fucked“.
Food Stamp Use at Record Pace as Jobs Vanish. (NY Times)
Driven by a painful mix of layoffs and rising food and fuel prices, the number of Americans receiving food stamps is projected to reach 28 million in the coming year, the highest level since the aid program began in the 1960s.
The number of recipients, who must have near-poverty incomes to qualify for benefits averaging $100 a month per family member, has fluctuated over the years along with economic conditions, eligibility rules, enlistment drives and natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, which led to a spike in the South.
But recent rises in many states appear to be resulting mainly from the economic slowdown, officials and experts say, as well as inflation in prices of basic goods that leave more families feeling pinched. Citing expected growth in unemployment, the Congressional Budget Office this month projected a continued increase in the monthly number of recipients in the next fiscal year, starting Oct. 1 — to 28 million, up from 27.8 million in 2008, and 26.5 million in 2007.
The percentage of Americans receiving food stamps was higher after a recession in the 1990s, but actual numbers are expected to be higher this year.
Federal benefit costs are projected to rise to $36 billion in the 2009 fiscal year from $34 billion this year.
High Rice Cost Creating Fears of Asia Unrest. (NY Times)
HANOI — Rising prices and a growing fear of scarcity have prompted some of the world’s largest rice producers to announce drastic limits on the amount of rice they export.
The price of rice, a staple in the diets of nearly half the world’s population, has almost doubled on international markets in the last three months. That has pinched the budgets of millions of poor Asians and raised fears of civil unrest.
Shortages and high prices for all kinds of food have caused tensions and even violence around the world in recent months. Since January, thousands of troops have been deployed in Pakistan to guard trucks carrying wheat and flour. Protests have erupted in Indonesia over soybean shortages, and China has put price controls on cooking oil, grain, meat, milk and eggs.
Food riots have erupted in recent months in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen. But the moves by rice-exporting nations over the last two days — meant to ensure scarce supplies will meet domestic needs — drove prices on the world market even higher this week.
What they didn’t tell you about recent meat recall. (Chicago Tribune via Seattle Times)
Those products include two versions of Nestlé’s Hot Pocket sandwiches, Heinz’s Boston Market lasagna with meat sauce, General Mills’ Progresso Italian Wedding Soup and a variety of meat products from ConAgra, ranging from Slim Jim snacks to Hunt’s Manwich Original Sloppy Joe Sauce.
The companies stressed that the use of Hallmark/Westland meat was limited, and that they notified retailers and told them to pull those products.
But none had taken the usual step of notifying consumers through news releases and warnings on Web sites.
Why the secrecy? In part because the recall is indirect; the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) urged Hallmark/Westland to contact food producers that use its meat and urge them to pull their products. But the USDA did not contact food producers.
The food manufacturers said they are under no obligation to notify consumers.
Queue up Jim Gaffigan singing voice: “Death Pocket!”
Up here in Oregon, the winters are bleak and stark, with weeks upon consecutive weeks of rain and grey. There’s a phenomenon called “Seasonal Affective Disorder” that can be used to explain the winter doldrums we experience in the Pacific Northwest (although we tend to call it by its less-pedantic moniker, “alcoholism”). While I wait for the return of the sun and the dissipation of the thick cloud cover, I can’t help but focus on how old I’ve become.
I turned 35 a half year ago, and for me it was a watershed milestone. I’m now officially middle-aged. (I base this assumption upon the fact that 67 is the retirement age that the Social Security Administration deems you’ve slaved long enough to collect full benefits. I then add over two years to this number for that realization to actually sink in).
At the time of my birthday, I had no time to reflect or dwell, as my wife was in the hospital undergoing the second of two major surgeries to remove cancerous tumors from her mid-section, and my best friend was in another hospital barely cheating death with a nasty bout of lymphoblastic leukemia. Also, it was Venezuelan Flag Day, which for socialist Hugo-philes like myself is equivalent of Christmas and Bastille Day rolled into one.
Now that things have slowed down a bit, I’m now awash in the morass of listlessness and depression that accompanies the gradual march towards death. Also, my Arizona Wildcats are in danger of missing the NCAA men’s basketball tournament for the first time in 24 years, and Mike Huckabee is no longer a viable candidate for the Republican presidential nominee, which means that we will not have a candidate this year that believed Man and Dinosaur both existed at the same time. Calgon, take me away.
You know you’re old if:
- You reach for salt in your kitchen and realize—in addition to kosher and iodized salt—you have 9 types of sea salt
- After your daughter knocks your beer chalice off the table and breaks the glass, spilling witbier all over the carpet and sofa, causing your wife to yell at you for playing ball in the house, you realize at this point in your life there’s pretty much nothing she can say or do to ever make you stop
- Dinner and a movie becomes just dinner or just a movie and then becomes sitting on the couch with a laptop and yelling at the Internet
- If in previous decades you used to look in the mirror and see promise and potential, you now remark to yourself, “Wow, time to tame those nose hairs”
- You remember when rap music didn’t suck
- You’re thinking about rehab because the first one didn’t “take”
- Your anger and resentment transgresses from players and the coach and shoots up the vitriol hierarchy to the actual baseball GMs themselves
- You have a food blog
- You stop and consider the full implications of amortization
- You get replacement earphones for your iPod because you feel self-conscious with white earbuds in public
- You are resentful that another one of your friends is getting married, not because you’re losing a friend to marriage or that it reminds you that everybody’s getting older, but because you’re compelled to go to Las Vegas and suffer through a punishing weekend
- You foment a fondness for a certain brand of toilet paper
- You take the bus downtown on New Year’s Eve and realize everybody on the bus is younger than you and has spent more money on their clothes
- Flipping through the channels, you come across Suze Orman and don’t immediately change the channel
- You call up your mobile phone provider and yell at them for the 3rd time to remove incoming text capabilities from your device
- You need a vacation to recover from your vacation
- You have a difficult time keeping track of which celebrities are dead or alive
- You reflexively spew invectives at anybody who tells you to visit their MySpace page
- While paging through the recorded episodes on your DVR, you realize that it’s 50% PBS shows—including Ruff Ruffman, Frontline, and Clifford the Big Red Dog
- You develop curmudgeonly insane rationalizations, such as “I’ll reduce my carbon footprint the moment somebody perfects microwave pizza”
- You’ve rearranged your garage for the third time in as many months
- One of your favorite bands is playing, and you say “I’ll just catch them next time they come to town on the back leg of the current tour” and the band either breaks up or dies before you can do so
- Your skepticism is no longer reserved for standard, questionable precepts such as Religion and Government, and instead trades in theories related to the systemic suppression of Monosodium Glutamate
Lawmaker: USDA shouldn’t cover food safety. (MSNBC)
A lawmaker called Tuesday for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to be stripped of its responsibility for food safety in the wake of the nation’s largest-ever meat recall.
The agency’s twin mandates of promoting the nation’s agriculture and monitoring it for safety have become blurred, Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro said.
“Food safety ought to be of a high enough priority in this nation that we have a single agency that deals with it and not an agency that is responsible for promoting a product, selling a product and then as an afterthought dealing with how our food supply is safe,” said DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who chairs the House subcommittee responsible for the USDA’s funding.
Hard to say if a new bureaucratic arm of the federal government is the answer, but it’s clear the present system is broken. The market has decided: we don’t care if you die.
USDA Makes Nation’s Largest Beef Recall. (AP)
The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Sunday recalled 143 million pounds of frozen beef from a California slaughterhouse, the subject of an animal-abuse investigation, that provided meat to school lunch programs.
Officials said it was the largest beef recall in the United States, surpassing a 1999 ban of 35 million pounds of ready-to-eat meats. No illnesses have been linked to the newly recalled meat, and officials said the health threat was likely small.
The recall will affect beef products dating to Feb. 1, 2006, that came from Chino-based Westland/Hallmark Meat Co., the federal agency said.
Hallmark Meat Co.?
US store chain cuts sales of food from China. (Yahoo! News)
US grocery chain Trader Joe’s said Monday it would stop selling food imported from China due to customers’ concerns about the products’ safety.
“Our customers have voiced concerns about products from this region and we have listened,” Trader Joe’s spokeswoman Alison Mochizuki said in a statement.
“All single ingredient food items sourced from mainland China sre scheduled to be out of our stores by April 1,” she said.
“We will continue to source products from other regions until our customers feel as confident as we do about the quality and safety of Chinese products.”
The 20 Worst Foods in America. (Men’s Health).
What’s the worst?
Outback Steakhouse Aussie Cheese Fries with Ranch Dressing
- 2,900 calories
- 182 g fat
- 240 g carbs
Who would have thought fried potatoes covered in cheese and dipped in pure fat would be so bad for you? I may have to re-examine the bacon-gizzard protein shakes I usually have for breakfast.
The world’s rubbish dump: a garbage tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan (Independent UK).
A “plastic soup” of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.
The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world’s largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting “soup” stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.
Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” or “trash vortex”, believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday: “The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States.”
Poison Dumplings Kill Japanese Merger (Business Week)
The overnight slump in U.S. stocks was the overwhelming reason for Japan’s Nikkei 225 index plunging 4.7% on Feb. 6. But for Nissin Food Products, the company that brought the world instant noodles, it was the continuing fallout from a scandal over contaminated dumplings that sent shares into free fall, tumbling 8.5%.
Nissin’s stock is the latest innocent victim of a batch of tainted, Chinese-made gyoza dumplings, imported by Japan Tobacco’s food arm, which led to more than 10 cases of food poisoning. News of the poisonings broke last week (BusinessWeek.com, 1/31/08) and triggered a slew of recalls of products produced by Tianyang Food, the Chinese producer of the dumplings. A huge news story in Japan, the scandal also renewed fears among consumers over the safety of Chinese products.
High Mercury Levels Are Found in Tuna Sushi (NY Times)
Recent laboratory tests found so much mercury in tuna sushi from 20 Manhattan stores and restaurants that at most of them, a regular diet of six pieces a week would exceed the levels considered acceptable by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Sushi from 5 of the 20 places had mercury levels so high that the Food and Drug Administration could take legal action to remove the fish from the market. The sushi was bought by The New York Times in October.
Add cream cheese in a maki roll named after some erstwhile American municipality and all of a sudden eating sushi in America insults the diner on many levels.
A drink a day for a longer life: study. (Yahoo! News)
Drinking is healthy, exercise is healthy, and doing a little of both is even healthier, Danish researchers reported on Wednesday.
People who neither drink nor exercise have a 30 to 49 percent higher risk of heart disease than people who do one or both of the activities, the researchers said in the European Heart Journal.
“The main finding is there seems to be an additional beneficial effect of drinking one to two drinks per day and doing at least moderate physical activity,” said Morten Gronbaek of the University of Southern Denmark, who led the study.
Meat, poultry, vegetables feel heat from global warming. (Yahoo! News)
From meat, poultry and milk to potatoes, onions and leafy greens, everything consumed on the world’s dining tables is feeling the heat from climate change, scientists say.
Researchers are trying to establish the extent to which global warming will affect livestock, plant life and staple crops such as rice to bolster their resistance to disease and breed stronger varieties.
The world’s billion poor, whether producers or consumers, will bear the brunt, warned scientists who ended a conference Saturday on agriculture and climate change in Hyderabad, southern India.
Food makers are pressured to cut sodium
Americans eat nearly two teaspoons of salt daily, more than double what they need for good health — and it’s not because of the table salt-shaker. Three-fourths of that sodium comes inside common processed foods like stuffing mix, gravy, and yes, pumpkin pie.
Even raw turkey, which is naturally low in sodium, sometimes is injected with salt water before it reaches the store, a lot more salt than a home cook might sprinkle on. You have to read the brand’s fine print to tell.
Now public health specialists are pressuring the Food and Drug Administration to require food makers to cut the sodium. In a hearing set for next week, they will call the government intervention crucial to fighting heart disease.
“There’s just a growing scientific consensus that current levels of salt in the diet are one of the biggest health threats to the public,” says Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group that filed the FDA petition triggering the meeting.
Passed on without comment, as I am a person who has a drawer full of 9 different types of salt at this very moment.
Fast Food Items Highest In Trans Fat – The 88 least healthy foods. (A Calorie Counter)
Keeping in mind just how terrible trans fat is and all of the terrible things it can cause, I have given this the very catchy nickname of “The 88 Fast Food Items Most Likely To Kill You.” When you look over this list with the understanding that you should be eating 0 grams of trans fat per day, you’ll realize that my little nickname really isn’t that much of an overstatement.
Jack-in-the-box, Burger King, White Castle — the usual suspects.
Turn your backyard barbecue green. (CNN.com)
Labor Day, Memorial Day and the Fourth of July are the most popular days to cook outside on the grill says the Hearth, Patio & Barbecue Asssociation. Americans grill with a passion, the group notes, with eight out of 10 U.S. households owning a grill or smoker and half use it more than four times a month.
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But if you’re one of the growing number of Americans who are also becoming passionate about the environment, you may be concerned that your backyard barbecue is adding to global warming and wondering what you can do to make burger flipping a bit more environmentally sound.
Shut the fuck up.
See Sicko. American healthcare sucks. We suck. Big time.
Fuck you.
PETA blasts Michael Moore for eating meat. (MSNBC)
The animal-rights group is blasting the filmmaker as a hypocrite for criticizing the U.S. healthcare system in his new documentary, “Sicko,” because they say he’s in such poor health himself.
“There’s an elephant in the room, and it is you,” PETA president Ingrid Newkirk wrote in a letter to Moore.
God bless Michael Moore. Go see Sicko, and say simultaneous FUs to greedy corporate health care AND PETA.
Foie gras could be tasty way to get Alzheimer’s. (Times Online)
FOIE GRAS, enjoyed as a luxury since ancient Egyptian times, may be linked to the onset of diseases including Alzheimer’s, type 2 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, researchers have suggested.
The scientists who carried out the study say those with a family history of such illnesses should consider avoiding foie gras.
The possible risk comes from “amyloid” proteins found in the delicacy, which is made from the swollen livers of force-fed geese and ducks. The proteins have been linked to the onset of all these conditions.
In their study, the researchers found mice fed on foie gras started growing amyloid proteins in various organs. They observed a similar result when extract of foie gras was injected into the rodents’ bloodstream.
This latest bit of alarmism doesn’t affect me either way, but I am still creeped out by this.
Funny: Harry Reid on the 2008 GOP field.
Not Funny: Dennis Miller on Harry Reid.
The difference here is that Harry Reid is a senator. Dennis Miller is purportedly a comedian.
Bonus imaginary Dennis Miller schtick (cue smarmy voice) on his own career : I haven’t seen something go south this fast since Linda Lovelace after a blow bender. Topo Gigio! Cha cha!
I was constructing some pixels on the iErector Set this evening, and the History Channel fiddled in the background. It segued from a program on the history of cocaine to one concerning the meticulous nature of the ancient Mayan calendar and its systematic calculations (as decoded by the Dresden codex).
We are entering the tail end of this katun cycle.
And, if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s at the end of a processional cycle.
The Long Count is a large segment of time (1/5 of the 26,000-year cycle of the precession of the equinoxes) with a definite starting and ending point. The period began on August 11, 3114 BC and it ends on December 21, 2012.
The 256-year cycle of thirteen katuns, the “short count,” was clearly a Mayan prophecy cycle. Each of the 13 katuns has a specific “fate” attached to it and the Maya believed that the occurrence, or arrival, of each katun brought with it this fate.
Some days it’s best to not get out of bed.
Basically, the Mayans have portended that on Dec. 21, 2012, the earth will reach the center point of the Milky Way. Planets will thus align and a cosmic event will occur.
No biggie? Well, it happens only every 26,000 years or so, and Mayan creation mythology targets this conspicuous calendar day as the date of annihilation.
Before you poo-poo, let me remind you that the Mayans knew their shit. They built entire, intricate fucking pyramids and shit that soared into the heavens, all without cranes or Caterpillar trucks or CAD software. 500 years before the Spanish came and fucked shit up old school, the Mayans excelled in astronomy and mathematics, and developed a written language independent of any outside influence. Their calendar system was amazingly complex, and the Mayans grasped the concept of zero that allowed them to formulate large ass numerical concepts. Oh yeah, they also discovered chocolate.
And the Mayans have been through this before. Their civilization strangely collapsed in the 10th century. Go ask Mel Gibson. What did it? Who knows? Maybe environmental ruin and wars amongst rival city-states over increasingly scant resources (sound familiar?) contributed to the mysterious Mayan diaspora and demise of a once great intellectual society.
The rise to prominence of NASCAR and the creation of MySpace notwithstanding, I’ve been trying lately to be a bit more optimistic about life and the future. It’s all I can do to put my mind at ease when I contribute to my 401k twice monthly on payday. And ever since we rode that nasty Y2K juju out, I’ve felt somewhat redeemed by my lingering (undeserved) faith in the ability of mankind to just deal.
However, this now throws everything into flux. This, fermented with the loquacious doomsday congener that is that fucker James Howard Kunstler, is enough to foment in any guy with a 30-year home mortgage simultaneous dread and exhilaration.
What will this Mayan End of Times bring? On the day of the Winter Solstice, a little over four years from now?
Societies will rise, flourish, and perish. A new order will arise. This will usher in the start of a new katun cycle. “For half there will be food, others misfortune.”
Tumultuous and drastic change, devastation, socio-political disruptions on a magnitude unseen in human history. A test for our species…but yet an opportunity for transformation and renewal? Will humanity come to terms with itself and face its future?
The vital question is how to we prepare for this coming transformation. Could humanity be wiped off the face of the earth come 2012? What steps are we taking to prevent this cataclysmic event horizon?
Then a commercial for the iPhone comes on, which demonstrates how easy it is to get calamari in San Francisco.
U.S. government fights to keep meatpackers from testing all slaughtered cattle for mad cow. (IHT)
The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease.
The Agriculture Department tests fewer than 1 percent of slaughtered cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted beef. A beef producer in the western state of Kansas, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, wants to test all of its cows.
Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone should test its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the expensive tests on their larger herds as well.
The Agriculture Department regulates the test and argued that widespread testing could lead to a false positive that would harm the meat industry.
Acoustic Stove Could Aid Third World. (Discovery News)
An appliance being designed for developing communities in Africa and Asia not only generates electricity, but also cooks and cools using acoustic technology.
…
The efficiency comes from a technology known as thermoacoustics, which produces sound waves from heated gas and then converts them to electricity.
Here’s how it works: wood is placed inside the stove and burned. The fire heats compressed air that has been pumped into specially shaped pipes located inside the stove’s chimney and behind the stove.
The heated air begins to vibrate and produce sound waves. Inside the pipes, the noise is 100 times louder than a jet taking off. But because the pipes are stiff and do no vibrate, the sound waves have nowhere to go. So outside the pipe, people hear only a faint hum.
Firing up the grill? Make it a ‘rare’ occasion. (LA Times)
Nothing that good can be good for us, of course. And yes, the natural chemicals that give barbecued foods their trademark crusty-brown smokiness are toxic and carcinogenic. Researchers have linked consumption of flame-grilled meat to all sorts of ailments: breast, prostate and colon cancer; diabetes; glaucoma; heart disease; and Alzheimer’s disease.
…
But you don’t have to convert to a raw food diet yet. Barbecue chemicals may be potent toxins in petri dishes and mice, but the evidence that they do the same in humans, at the doses we’re exposed to, is weaker.
Most studies find a significant increase in cancer risk only for people who eat several portions of well- or very well-done meat a week. And even then, the risk is often small. For example, a 2005 study in Cancer Research found a 21% increase in the risk of developing colon cancer precursors for people eating as much as 18 ounces of well-done red meat per day. The bottom line: A twice-weekly date with a medium-rare steak is unlikely to give you cancer any time soon.
Bottom line, stay away from well-done meat. Not only does it ruin the cut, IT WILL FUCKING KILL YOU. It should be reserved for those with suicidal tendencies and corrupt congressmen with homo-erotically polluted jacuzzi fetishes. My main man Jeffrey Steingarten speaks truth to power:
Jeffrey Steingarten, food writer for Vogue magazine, thinks very critically about what he puts in his mouth and has yet to find sufficient evidence to steer clear of a perfectly done steak — which, in his estimation, is somewhere between rare and medium rare.
For those who choose to grill their steaks to the blackened point of well-done shoe leather, his tongue-in-cheek opinion is simple: “If you eat a steak like that, you don’t deserve to live.”
Did you hear about the big news yesterday? Fundamentalist terrorists had planned to use improvised explosive devices against Americans on their own soil! What? You didn’t? Even just a few weeks after the Virginia Tech massacres?
FDA Says Quarantined Hogs Are Safe to Eat. (Washington Post)
Fine, you eat them, then. Serve melamine ribs at the FDA Memorial Day BBQ as a show of strength.
The FDA has become a joke. See, government regulation doesn’t work? Right?
By the same logic — just to prove that marriage is a failed institution — I married my wife only to cheat on her with a rented stud whose number I got from the back pages of Well Hung Weekly.
Farmed fish given meal tainted with melamine. (MSNBC)
WASHINGTON – Farmed fish have been fed meal spiked with the same chemical that has been linked to the pet food recall, but the contamination was probably too low to harm anyone who ate the fish, federal officials said Tuesday.
The Canadian-made meal included what was purported to be wheat gluten, a protein source, imported from China. The material was actually wheat flour spiked by the chemical melamine and related, nitrogen-rich compounds to make it appear more protein rich than it was, officials said.
There’s no strength left for pithy remarks. What with Paris Hilton and all.
Are mobile phones wiping out our bees? (The Independent).
It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world’s harvests fail.
They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world – the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops.
This really is quite frightening. The kind of thing that — during days in which my faith in fortuitousness feels increasingly tenuous — makes me want to curl up underneath my bed in a fetal position. Or dig out a plot in rural Alberta, stock up on canned goods and freeze dried sundries, and arm myself to the teeth.
* These words were once coined (as lyrics in a song) by an acquaintance of mine vis-à-vis that age-old chaos theory axiom