PLEASE COOPERATE? PRETTY PLEASE?

"U.S. consumers would not benefit from knowing which grocery stores, restaurants and butchers stocked meat products potentially contaminated with deadly bacteria, the top U.S. Agriculture Department food safety official said on Wednesday." In other news, up is down and down is up. Listen to this: "Elsa Murano told a House subcommittee that consumers would not benefit because companies send meat to places other than grocery stores and restaurants." Oh, OK. Right. That makes about as much sense as does eating this crap - or as this one: "Murano said companies would not be as cooperative if they were forced to share information." Oh, they wouldn't be cooperative, huh? Well, then why not SHUT THEM THE HELL DOWN IMMEDIATELY? No cooperative, no operative. I mean, what other industry could get away with this food-supply terrorism? Well, it's all ridiculous fun and games till you have another large recall of meat with excessive feces - aka e.coli. And even then all the crap can be kind of smirkworthy till you find out it may already have sent children to the hospital with the excruciating illness.

EDITORIAL 3/19: "The U.S. Department of Agriculture is supposed to protect American consumers from tainted meat. Instead, it appears to be more interested in protecting irresponsible meat processing companies. ...(their) attitude should make American consumers wonder whose side the Agriculture Department is on." (St. Petersburg Times)

MAKIN' TROUBLE IN FLORIDA

A law that forces milk on schoolchildren needs to be overturned by Congress says the Orlando Sentinel's in yesterday's editorial.

VEGETARIANS LIVE LONGER

That's the title of this study from Germany that found that "People who eat little or no meat can expect to live significantly longer than the general population." OK, is that settled now? More meat = Less life. However, the study of 2000 vegetarians and near-vegetarians is not a slam-dunk for the no-animal-protein crowd, possibly due to the size of the sample and some inexact categorizing, possibly not. Little distinction seems to have been made between lacto-ovo vegetarians and occasional meat-eaters. Also, 60 people, or three percent, of the people were vegans, and their lifespans did not outpace the vegetarians or the eat-just-a-little-meat folks. More, better-proportioned studies could be done with larger groups of vegans to tease out whether this is an accurate assessment for 21st-century vegans, but even if so, the fact that most Americans are killing themselves early through their glut of meat-eating is incontrovertible.