We Are All Going to Die
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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.
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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.
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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