MORE MIXED METAPHORS

In other animal-bashing news, ranchers on public land are crying wolf. In a literal sense, they mean it - wolves are "threatening their livelihood" by occasionally killing livestock. But in a figurative sense, the ranchers themselves are the wolves in sheeps' clothing. After destroying public lands with the ravages of large livestock operations (including, to no small degree, the manure and urine thus produced) now they want to overturn federal wildlife protection programs rather than find some safer and less bogus livelihood. Bruce Babbitt pointed out that while many ranchers have come to regard the federal land they lease as their own, it is not: "These are public lands owned by the people of the United States." Too bad so few of those people even know that, much less care.

HORSES AND COWS

A couple illustrations of why our relationship to our food is so screwed up. This St. Petersburg Times columnist seems mystified at how "squeamish" Americans are about eating horse meat (after all, something needs to be done with those who have "outlived their usefulness") and mixes his metaphors by calling horses a "sacred cow" here. Meanwhile, in a small farm town outside Seattle, residents are struck dumb by the brutality of one of their own kids, who clubbed 33 calves in the head, killing 16 of them. Four of the calves, it's said, are in "critical condition." The head of the Washington State Dairy Association pointed out that cows are "like family -- you know who their mothers are, their fathers, their grandmothers." Awwwww. So... when a crazed kid does it, it's unspeakable, inexplicable brutality to defenseless creatures. When the slaughterhouse worker down the road does it... it's dinner.

NAW, FAT'S NOT BAD FOR YA

Here's another quickie: A diet high in fat, calcium and calories is now clearly linked to prostate cancer. Gee, what do those highs apply to? Meat and milk! Of course, the link had already been made in over a dozen previous studies, especially for milk... but this is the first one since I started this blog.

RECALL REDUX

Boy, you go away for a holiday weekend and the stories pile up. I won't be able to get to all these today, but just for starters, our pals at the Denver Post are once again asking why the USDA keeps crucial life-saving information from the public in the case of contaminated meat, and whether even that low standard of compliance was violated, in the recall I posted back on August 24. Gee, it's a good question...

BEEF NOT NEEDED FOR BEEFY BODY

This is a small, preliminary study, but it does give a small, preliminary raspberry to the quacks who try to convince vegetarians that plant protein doesn't do the same job of body-building that animal protein does. Hopefully once there are more 70-year-old vegans (the term was only coined 60 years ago, after all), more comprehensive and precise studies can follow up.

GARY TAUBES'S "BIG FAT LIE"

Barring some dramatic development, such as a 'fraud' lawsuit, this will be the last post on Gary Taubes's sensationalistic NYT Magazine piece, mentioned earlier, which explained how Taubes's own fat-laden (Atkins) diet was better for you than actual healthy food. It was no surprise that the Pritikin folks, who got slammed in Taubes's drive-by, soon posted their own common-sense corrections, as did PCRM. But some readers may have been a little unnerved when CNN had three of Taubes's experts on to discuss how they were wildly misquoted and misrepresented in the pro-fat rant. Now the Washington Post has followed up with a careful background check debunking - to his face - Taubes's assertions about what has or has not been proven by peer-reviewed research. Astonishingly (I guess), study after study shows that low-fat diets are better for not just overall health but weight-loss as well. Taubes is given a chance to explain how and why he managed to miss all of this crucial evidence, and his answers are priceless, especially the one that closes this article.

WHERE THE HEALTH IS

I'm including this not because it's particularly noteworthy or surprising or anything, it's just that I've been falling down on the job of the Meat Facts mission statement, which is to compare news about corpse-based nutrition to that about plant-based nutrition. So far it's leaned wayyy over into the former realm, mainly because the positive effects of plant foods are all in stories like this, that aren't nearly as dramatic and outrageous as the "meatier" stories. But there are thousands of these, so let this stand in for at least a few hundred: Vitamin E protects against artery disease, and according to this, good vitamin E sources are legumes, vegetables and olive oil. The NIH concurs, adding nuts and specifying green leafy vegetables.

MORE BAILOUTS FOR RANCHERS

Once again the USDA steps in to assure that the "free market" for beef isn't affected by the same realities - such as weather - that affect plant-based agriculture. Four states will get $150 million - courtesy of taxpayers - in livestock feed at a drastically reduced cost. This isn't the only helping hand ranchers get, of course. Other than the USDA's constant buying and price-fixing, there's stuff like the following: "The Emergency Conservation Program and Environmental Quality Incentives Program have helped ranchers get water to dried up watering holes and stock dams. Opening land in the Conservation Reserve Program to haying and grazing has been a tremendous help as well, but Karlen says it still takes a lot of money to get the feed and water to the livestock." Yep. It sure does. Good thing you don't have to actually watch that money go down the drain.

NOW TASTELESS IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE!

McDonald's, reeling from recent international PR fiascoes in Italy and Japan (and, of course, the earlier one in England), now manufactures another in Norway with its "badly timed" introduction of the "McAfrica" burger - that's right, named after the very country where 12 million people are starving largely due to the global pillaging of Western behemoths like McDonald's. Bad timing? Or just plain ol' bad attitude?

WHAT? NO MORE INTESTINE-BASED TREATS?

Scots and Scot-wannabes are mourning (and defiantly challenging) the demise of haggis, one of the most bizarrely disgusting foods yet devised. The traditional treat is being banned not because it's just plain sicko, but because it's a great vehicle for BSE.

'SHE ATE A DIET RICH IN FRUITS AND VEGETABLES'

...and lived to be 114. Not that there's necessarily a correlation between a plant-based diet and longevity - I'm just posting this to balance out any other long-lived people before or since who will credit their two cigars a day or fifth of scotch or whatever.

WONDER WHAT THE 'SOURCE' OF THIS IS?

Those dangerous tomatoes seem to also have managed to
infect 358 tons of beef with E. Coli, which was distributed nationwide. Another ConAgra-sized storm in the making, or something we'll all laugh off as we get ready to go back to school? You decide.

TOMATO FECES?

OK, the fact that Disney, which is a societal poison of its own, is entertaining in this, but I'm getting tired of patently inaccurate statements like this: "The outbreak source was prepackaged, diced Roma tomatoes served at six Disney World restaurants..."
Uh, no. You see, for tomatoes to be the SOURCE of salmonella, tomatoes would have to produce FECES, which is where salmonella comes from. Tomatoes were probably the VEHICLE for this outbreak, but the SOURCE was feces, most probably chicken feces. But that will come out in a shorter, played-down story later. Why do we have to be so Mickey-Mouse about something as dangerous as food poisoning?

BEEF GETS A LEG TO STAND ON

I guess the USDA really is studying Meat Facts. A day after I posited that beef could be on its last legs if free-market Republicans didn't step in and bail it out, whaddaya know? That's just what they did, buying up 3 million pounds of it to force on kids in public school lunch programs. In just the past two months, $50 million of your tax money has gone to bail out beef. Good thing it's always "on sale" at the supermarket - whatta bargain, eh?

THIS CAN'T BE RIGHT

In my posts about water and the difference in amount required for plant/animal food, I have erred on the conservative side, calling the difference only "a fraction," or a difference of "ten to a hundred times" when I know it's actually very solidly 100 times. That said, I'm almost positive this is a typo. If not, somebody's gotta whole lotta splainin to do. In a Japanese study of agricultural water needs, "Beef required 100,000 times more liquid than grains, pork 11,000 times and chicken 4,900 times." Lucy?

I'LL JUST SWITCH TO FISH III

The band Green Beings has a song "Plants Don't Run," about the difference between the morality of eating plants and of eating animals. But as terrific as that song is, if I do say so myself, it misses another big, important difference: Plants don't bite you and kill you while you're trying to eat them. Food for thought.

ONE MORE FROM THE POST

Taking off from the phenomenal arrogance of ConAgra and its animal-slaughtering ilk, the hometown paper has finally asked - and answered - the question that was already answered when PCRM won their conflict-of-interest lawsuit against the USDA. The question is, Is USDA too close to meat industry? Please note that along with the extreme concerns of "fringe" groups like CSPI and GAO, former USDA employees also admit it: The main purpose of the USDA is to do the bidding of the meat industry. Got it?

CONAGRA KILLS

While Meat Facts was on vacation, the Denver Post continued to follow the ConAgra recall situation. Since the national press has essentially dropped the story, you may not have heard that in addition to 47 documented illnesses, a woman in Ohio has died from the E.Coli in that batch of beef. Meanwhile, a former ConAgra employee is suing the company for fraud - charging that they intentionally altered records - and episodes from its history are coming to light, such as the time it resold listeria-tainted meat in the U.S. after it had been rejected by South Korea, and of course didn't bother to mention the contamination. A pattern of arrogance, a pattern of abuse.

DON'T LOOK NOW

"[We're doing things] that are not ethical," Batha says. "You can't dwell on that, because you'll get depressed."
"You have to close your mind to it."
These are quotes from an article on killing deer (without - gasp! - eating them, which would make it ethical, dontchaknow), but they illustrate the central problem with modern meat eating: We don't want to tthink about what we're doing. We do close our mind to it, and avoid any information about what happened to our meat before it reached our plate. That's why the widespread fraud, corruption and life-threatening sloppiness of this industry is so prevalent: because we don't want to watch. Then who should be watching? If your answer is the USDA, bear in mind that "The USDA, which some of us naively thought was there to protect consumers, really exists to promote the sale of U.S. farm products." Or so, at least, claim those wild-eyed anarchists at The Washington Post.

BEEF ON ITS LAST LEGS?

I'm just asking because Food Market Exchange reports that retail beef prices will stay high through at least the next year, due to flagging exports. High retail prices usually reduce demand, which could lead to a vicious cycle attacking this vicious product. That is, unless all those free-market Republicans in the current administration find yet another way to make us taxpayers bail out this repulsive industry. Hey, it's happened before - and it's happening right now! Still, this may someday be seen as the tipping point, the point of no return for an archaic foodstuff.