NEWS TO THOSE TO WHOM IT'S NEWS

"The sickening side of greyhound racing."

You mean there's a non-sickening side?

BITCH, BITCH, BITCH

Haven't read it, but this looks like an interesting tome, pushing the Vegan Freak and Vegan with a Vengeance envelope. Even Michael Greger's Carbophobia! didn't put it quite this starkly: "You are either a total moron if you think the Atkins diet will make you thin [or] you are a gluttonous pig who wants to believe you can eat cheeseburgers all day long and lose weight."

The frequent incoherence of the columnist covering this ("In context of the authors' earlier shock tactics, such suggestions [to go vegan] still surprise." Huh? How come? "If you're going to eat the junk, it may as well go in your trunk." Say whuzzah? "Tofurkey" Mmm-hmm.) is par for the course, but I tip my hat to her for choosing to cover it at all, and cluing me in to this book.

WOULDA, COULDA, SHOULDA

If only I'd thought ahead and bought the obvious domain name, I'd be a rich man today.

STOP THE PRESSES

By which I mean I hope this will get the press to stop treating this issue as an open question: "Is organic food really better for you?" Yes, it really is, as has already been proven in multiple studies. But now here's yet another: "Organic food really is better for you than conventionally grown crops, according to new research." Yes - according to new research - but also according to old research, which it would've been nice if the author had mentioned.

DEATH BY NON-VEGANISM

Gas From Farm's Manure Pit Kills Five runs the headline on this sad story including the deaths of two children. If I were as venal, cynical and frankly idiotic as Nina Planck I would claim that this single incident is an indictment of the entire practice of meat-eating. As it stands, of course, this is just one out of many ways animal agriculture causes the deaths of children and adult humans in addition to its billions of animal victims. Note that what happened here was an outgrowth of the intrinsic components of animal agriculture - it wasn't some outside force or extraordinary occurrence. The tragic, disgusting details reinforce how "full of it" the industry is, by its very nature:

Authorities say the accident began after Scott tried to transfer manure from one small pit to a larger one, measuring 20 by 20 feet and 8 feet deep. The pipe that was transferring the manure became clogged and Scott climbed in the pit to fix the blockage and immediately succumbed to the gas.

Emergency workers believe Stoltzfus climbed in to the pit to rescue Scott and after hearing all the commotion Phyillis and her two daughters all went it to the pit and succumbed to the deadly methane gas.

Methane gas is odorless and a colorless byproduct of liquefied manure. The Showalters milked 103 cows on their farm west of Harrisonburg. Farley says the Showalter farm was a modern dairy operation.

DOG BITES MAN'S CAMPAIGN

"Romney's treatment of family dog on 1983 vacation becomes issue," blares the Boston Globe, which first publishd the anecdote that is now becoming surgically attached to the Mitt Romney persona: How he put his dog in a carrier with a homemade windshied, strapped it to the roof of his car and set off on a 12-hour trip with one unscheduled stop when the dog's diarrhea ran down the back of the car.

Although PETA is doing its damnedest to blunt the effect by making this into yet another PETA story, the dog issue does seem to be gaining some traction, largely because it plays into discomforts that many already have with the Romney persona. One liberal blogger calls it "classic Romney: It solves a problem efficiently, in a business-like manner, and with no regard whatsoever for the suffering that the solution may cause." Heh. Meanwhile, over on the right side we get: "In Romney’s defense, however, I’d note that the incident took place over twenty-five years ago. Goodness knows, his views on dog travel have certainly changed half a dozen times in the interim." Yowch. Could be some "ruff" riding ahead for Mitt.

WELCOME TO CIVILIZATION

Louisiana manages to win the dubious honor of
last state in America to ban cockfighting. I guess it's better than still being the only state not to.

FRIDAY RECALLS: THE PAYOFF

In February I mentioned the disparity between the hysterical amount of ink plant-food recalls were getting vs. the standard complete silence afforded meat recalls.

So now it's peanut butter with salmonella. You've heard about that, haven't you? But I'm willing to wager that just in the past month, you haven't heard about ... the chicken breast strips with Listeria (26 tons)

Well, turns out I was right, as now detailed in a marketing article about how to play the recall game. "[C]onsumer awareness levels of various recalls, and impacts on brands, vary significantly, according to results of a Harris Interactive survey of 2,563 adults focusing on six recent product recalls," the article says at the outset, and moving to specifics, adds:

For example, only 20% of respondents said they were familiar with this past February's recall of chicken breast cuts and strips caused by Listeria monocytogenes contamination--and among these consumers, only 2% correctly identified Oscar Meyer as one of the brands involved. Under 0.5% correctly identified Louis Rich as the other brand. In fact, 17% named brands other than those involved.

In contrast, 71% of respondents were familiar with the peanut butter recall caused by a Salmonella outbreak, also in February 2007, and 42% correctly identified Peter Pan as the brand involved.

Unfortunately, the article essentially offers warmed-over platitudes rather than drawing out why one recall "succeeds" in generating awareness and another "fails" to do so. Among the helpful tips, "put your press release out on a Friday" and "run a company that shares past and future staff with the agency that's regulating you" - arguably the two most effective strategies for minimizing "damage" from a recall - are conspicuously absent.

SYNERGY

I had a post about ready to go on these two stories about a weight-loss study and a weight-loss drug, but then I repurposed it for Vegcast, so please avail yourself of it there. Thanks.

6 MILLION POUNDS OF GROUND BEEF RECALLED

The ingenuity of our USDA, in conjunction with their meat-industry masters, is, as always, remarkable. Rather than dump a headline like that into the work week where people might see it and think something's up with their meat, the USDA starts nice and small: On Sunday, 75,000 pounds is recalled. On Wednesday, that's expanded to 300,000. That's 1,500 tons of meat, of course, but that amount is dwarfed by the second expansion, which happens - of course! - on Saturday, to the tune of 5.7 million pounds now suspected of E.Coli. Wonder how many Sunday papers had that news? Well played. (Special kudos since it even escaped my radar up till now!)

UNBELIEVABLE

Another news item that would be funny if there weren't so much death and stupidity associated with it: "Five chickens from a primary school hutch have been decapitated in a sickening act of animal cruelty. Police believe the offenders ripped the chooks' heads off with their bare hands early yesterday." The RSPCA official called this one of the worst acts of animal cruelty he had ever heard of and compared the culprits to serial killers. "It's unbelievable that somebody could kill a chicken by physically ripping its head off. It's very disturbing and it's an extreme type of cruelty," Mr Boland said.

Cognitive dissonance, anyone? Killing chickens by ripping their heads off is "unbelievable" and "disturbing" cruelty, while shackling them by the neck and delivering them, "stunned" (not), to a decapitating blade is just shoulder-shrugging business-as-usual. Of course the storytelling has to dance around the real problem, because as we all know the distinction has nothing to do with the way the chickens died, but the fact that these chickens were not meant as food products - they had been ensouled by the schoolkids, and thus were magically elevated to a different form of being whose death is cruel and disturbing. In all seriousness, this is how the mainstream is forced to think about the deaths of animals. Funny, almost.

VEGAN OF THE MONTH

I don't usually cite every "new vegan eatery" story, and lord knows I've skipped a few months of declaring this title, but I couldn't pass up the context provided along with this story, headed by the line "Slaughterhouse site gives way to 'cruelty-free' fare":

Order a pizza or a sub at T.J. Scallywaggle's in Allston, and you'll get soy-based cheese, or mock meat made with soy protein, but no animal products. Go back a couple of centuries, however, and animal products were all you could have found on that site.

A report published by the Massachusetts Board of Health in 1870 described how these 19th-century slaughterhouses produced large quantities of animal waste. A "putrid mass, consisting of blood, the excrement of the animals killed, the half-digested food contained in the entrails, and the offal itself is scraped and banked up on the ground (often very spongy) or carted off to be spread upon land. The track of these carts is evident both to sight and smell."

ANOTHER ASTONISHING FRIDAY COINCIDENCE

Well, this is getting into Twilight Zone territory, no? By completely random chance, exactly one week after the previous big beef recall was announced on a Friday - when unfortunately and ironically almost no consumers would hear about it - there was yet another beef recall, twice as large as the previous week's, also announced on a Friday!

Maybe Rod Serling or Mr. Spock can explain this, because it sure seems there's something going strangely awry with the laws of probability. Couldn't be because of any human decision-making, of course, because such a decision would clearly put companys' short-term profit over American consumers' lives, and we know that wouldn't happen.

FUR YUR CONSIDERATION

I can't tell if this represents a cultural shift or not, so I'm throwing it out to y'all so you can decide for yourselves.

For those not familiar with the ancient newspaper feature, the JUMBLE, it's a daily puzzle of anagrammed words whose ultimate solution, usually a pun, is hinted in a cartoon illustration. The values and mores represented in these cartoons are usually as hokey and retro as anything on Nick at Nite, if not closer to Norman Rockwell-era. (Note the Birth-of-a-Nation-era director's outfit, for instance.)

In this one from last week, though, the "director" here has a pretty cheeky question. Note that the solution, "THAT'S A WRAP," does not bear on his apparent anti-fur sentiment in any way, unless we're to presume he closed down the day's shooting upon being presented with an actress wearing fur. So I gotta ask - the JUMBLE thinks calling people out for the outmoded cruelty of real fur is normative? Great, if true.

INVISIBLE ADS FAIL TO PERSUADE AMERICANS

Milk Mustaches by the truckload. "Beef: It's What's for Dinner." The Incredible Edible Egg. "Pork, the Other White Meat."

Result? Americans not consuming recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables. Only one in ten Americans meets the minimal five-serving recommendation. A quarter of Americans eat zero servings of vegetables a day, and well over half of them eat zero servings of whole fruit a day.

But here's the funny part: "Despite campaigns and slogans, Americans have not increased their consumption." Yeah, people, why aren't you paying attention to all those fruit-and-vegetable campaigns and slogans??? You know, the ones like... um.... well, uh... you know, that one that goes... uh... well... ? Hmmmm....

THEY'RE ASKING FOR IT

In an odd juxtaposition, "the Dalai Lama called Wednesday for a halt to lab experiments on animals and made the case for eating only fruits and vegetables... 'Hunting, beef, sheep farms, piggeries, millions, billions, die,' the Dalai Lama said. 'We can be so cruel to animals.'" So far, so good, except where did he make such a declaration? As a special guest of a zoo. Not just any zoo, but the zoo of the late "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin.

One wonders how the Dalai Lama reconciles this apparent incongruity. I guess there's no cruelty involved in forcing animals into wrestling matches in the name of mindless human entertainment. Maybe animals love wrestling so much that this counts as another one of those "mutually satisfying activities."

FRIVOLOUS LAWSUIT TOSSED

"A U.S. District Court judge Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit that sought to reverse the city's ban on the duck-liver delicacy known as foie gras. The lawsuit, filed by the Illinois Restaurant Association and Allen's New American Café last August, claimed the city of Chicago has no right to regulate the sale of a product that is produced legally. U.S. District Judge Blanche M. Manning summed up her 26-page ruling Tuesday by saying the ban on the sale of foie gras is not unconstitutional." How soon will Scalia be weighing in on this one?

WORLD'S FIRST VEGETARIAN CHOCOLATE BAR?

In a rarity for a blog, I'm not going to post a link to this story, because the "controversy" is so obviously about getting this brand more ink. But I was amused to see this well-known company promise it's about to introduce "the world’s first vegetarian chocolate bar." Number one, the bar will not be vegan, of course, since the company is all about milk chocolate, but number two, in what sense will this be a first? There are already literally dozens of not only vegetarian but vegan chocolate bars on the market. Way to fact-check your slightly-reworded press releases, "journalists."

ANOTHER ELEPHANT MARTYRED

"A young [6-year-old] Asian elephant that had delighted visitors at the Woodland Park Zoo since her birth died Friday, about a week after she began showing signs of abdominal pain, zoo officials said."

Well, sure, she's dead now, but think of all the delight. So it evens out, see?

MORE FRIDAY FREAKINESS

Oh. My. God. You are not gonna believe what happened. There was this massive beef recall, see, involving 40,440 pounds of ground beef potentially contaminated with deadly E.Coli, produced by one of America's most famous meat companies and sent to Wal-Marts in 12 states. And here's the thing: Guess what day of the week this recall was announced?

If you said "Friday," you're a regular Meat Facts reader. Pretty freaky coincidence, huh?

And a blogger at Food Consumer reminds us that with seven more E.Coli cases in North Carolina, "in the last six weeks there have been at least six recalls of red meat and nearly 50 people sickened." Not a pretty picture, but the one that accompanies it is certainly cute. Kind of cuts right to the chase, no?

UPDATE: In fairness, there was another recall last week that occurred on a Tuesday... for 140 pounds of listeria-contaminated chicken breast that may have made it to what, five stores? That level of recall seems fine for non-Friday treatment. Hmmm.