WAR IS BLECCCHHH

One week after more than 100 soldiers in Afghanistan came down with food poisoning from bad turkey stuffing on Thanksgiving (didn't they hear all the warnings?), close to 300 are now ill from food-poisoning in Kuwait with the source of the current outbreak unknown. Sounds like it's time to have the whole military go vegan, lest we lose World War III due to our stubborn addiction to meat.

SAME OLD SONG

Once again, it emerges that inspectors' warnings of contamination problems at a meat processing plant were ignored by both the plant and its PR agent, the USDA, until people started getting sick, and in fact, for some time thereafter. Meanwhile, a citizens' group is advocating a proposal that is entertaining if only for the degree to which it must scare the bejeezus out of meat suppliers: Consumers should get double their money back as an incentive to return recalled food according to Safe Tables Our Priority. Nope, it won't happen, but it's fun to picture the meat industry even worrying about whether it could.

NO LAUGHING MATTER

As I pointed out back when the first "fast-food lawsuit" was filed, it was considered a frivolous joke, but would soon evolve into a serious issue. Esteemed columnist Ellen Goodman has just made the same point, asking us to mark her words: "This is just the beginning of a big, fat food fight." And chiming in on the concept that despite all knee-jerk dismissals, this is something we're gonna hafta take seriously is the NY Post's Gersh Kuntzman. Still laughing?

DOLPHINS UNSAFE

If you buy "dolphin-safe tuna," thinking you're being so eco-correct, think again. It turns out that at least 3,000 dolphins are killed yearly by fishing in eastern tropical Pacific alone according to a Commerce Department report. Word is the Bush administration doesn't want to publicly release the report because that would undermine the government's attempt to help Mexico and other countries label their tuna as "dolphin-safe." So think again, and again, if you think fish is a thoughtful entree.

MCDONALD'S FLAMING OUT?

Maybe the company isn't at death's door, but individual stores are certainly seeing some heated debate. I told you how some workers were fed up with global anti-McDonald's sentiment and were fighting back, assaulting customers in New Zealand. The next phase, it seems, is to put razor blades into pies in New Orleans - to teach people to keep their mouths shut, I guess. But these violence breeds violence, and soon came word that another McDonald's has been firebombed, killing three. Not to be outdone, McDonald's itself blew up its own restaurant (via faulty air conditioning - or so they say), injuring 17 people. It's gotten so bad that Mickey D's is now pulling out of Bolivia for good, and the article on this mentions the chain "will be survived by Burger King." Gosh - survived? Isn't that the kind of language you use when something's... er... dying? No wonder CEO Greenberg decided to bail the hell out of this fiasco. Who can blame 'im?
UPDATE 12/12: Forget Bolivia - will Japan be next? McDonald's profits there just fell an unprecedented 95 percent!

THE WHOLE STORY

In this article on nutrition research, it's mentioned that "study after study links lifelong diets high in plant foods to lower cancer rates." So what do our nutrition leaders do with that knowledge of how the whole diet affects the metabolism? Tell people to eat lifelong diets high in plant foods? Of course not! The answer is to launch yet another study focusing on specific nutrients as if they operated in a vacuum! Meanwhile, a more comprehensive study found that a plant-based diet reduces cholesterol dramatically, possibly eliminating the need for cholesterol-lowering drugs. Heh heh - I can't wait to see what the pharmaceutical companies find to throw at this.

FISH UPDATE: MERCURY TRUMPS OMEGA-3s

This is a point I've been making myself for a while by juxtaposing news stories, and this study is far from definitive, but I thought it was worth linking to the first appearance I've seen of the basic concept spelled out for all to see: The mercury found in fish may counteract the benefits of omega3 fatty acids on the heart. In other words, no matter how heart-healthy fishes' Omega-3 fatty acids are, the mercury most fish has in it is that unhealthy and more. The story also claims that "warning(s) on mercury exposure should not be confined to high-risk groups like pregnant women, or those of child-bearing age who may become pregnant, as previously thought."
ALSO: This LA Times story on the devestation caused by salmon farming puts another ugly gouge in fish's "healthy" or "small-footprint" patina.

I'LL JUST SWITCH TO SHEEP

I don't usually post news reports relating to animal tests, given all the problems there are with that industry - both ethical and pragmatic - but I'll make an exception here because of the gravity of this news, and because it's centered on the animals themselves: It turns out that more people may have the human form of mad cow disease than previously thought - that is, people who have "ordinary" or "sporadic" CJD may be among those whose illness was caused by BSE. Previously only "new variant" CJD cases, which don't occur as frequently, were linked. The agent of this increase is sheep. And worse, a recent attempt to protect sheep from BSE failed miserably as a "resistant" sheep contracted mad cow disease in laboratory tests. The scientist who won the 1997 Nobel Prize for nailing down how prions work is now saying every person in Britain should be tested for CJD and every cow and sheep in the country should be tested for BSE, and stresses that "eating meat may still pose a serious health risk." These developments show how little we understand these diseases and how imperative it is that we eliminate their breeding grounds immediately, i.e. modern animal agriculture. Although that won't happen anytime soon, it may be hastened by more people wising up and staying away from sheep, beef and other likely agents for this deadly illness.

I'LL JUST SWITCH TO FISH - EAST ASIAN EDITION

It's bad enough when people here in the West eat fish, given that it's almost always packed with insoluble toxins. But at least it's not like in Shangai, where a fish monger is now in prison for coating every fish he sold with deadly poison "to make it look shinier and more attractive."
And over in Vietnam, a half-million people are estimated to be plagued by worms from eating raw fish. That's parasite worms, not nightcrawlers. But hey, isn't that ironic? Getting worms from eating fish? No. What's ironic is the concept of fish as a "healthy" food.

BIG MAC ATTACK

Finally fed up after all the beating it's taking on the stock exchange, all the burnings and bombings, all the lawsuits, and the general bad attitude shown toward the company by various constituencies, McDonald's is fighting back! That's right. Three workers at a New Zealand Mickey D's are accused of assaulting customers who were acting up too much. One guy is still in touch-and-go condition: "According to one witness, he was picked up off the ground and dumped on his head." Did somebody say... you talkin' to me? You talkin' to ME?

TOUGHER THAN BEEF CARCASSES

Dunno if you heard - I didn't until Tuesday - but there was another moderate-sized E. Coli recall - 320,000 pounds of beef, or 160 tons of dead animal. You might not have gotten wind of it, see, because ONCE *COUGH* AGAIN, the USDA thoughtfully scheduled this disclosure for a Friday afternoon! But don't worry, the all-new War-Against-E.Coli USDA is getting reeeeeeally tough now. For instance, that Conagra plant that caused the second-biggest recall ever, last summer? The one that had been cited dozens of times before that? The one that was subsequently closed down after 19 new citations for fecal contamination? Well, they better watch their step, because now they can only have FIVE feces-smeared carcasses per hundred before getting a citation, and only a handful of citations before they're (threatened with) shutdown. Yeah! We sure are kicking butt now!

TRYING TO TELL US SOMETHING?

As usual, PETA's getting ink by brewing up a brouhaha over something pointless. But now that they've made John Madden's fondness for Turducken a national issue, let me just add 2 quick thoughts: 1) Remember, you can't spell "Turducken" without "Turd," unless you cheat and use the alternate, more nonsensical spelling, and 2) what is it these guys have about stuffing one piece of meat up inside another? I mean, really.

ANIMATED ARGUMENT

Mark Fiore is a good political cartoonist who becomes excellent in animated form - especially when he's taking on the topic of Voluntary Regulation, i.e. how the meat industry gets to regulate itself. The cartoon's funny and makes its point well, but I can't help underscoring the fact that Fiore considers it common knowledge that the USDA is simply a tool of the meat industry rather than any kind of government watchdog.

BUNCH OF @#$%&!! TURKEYS

The USDA, a.k.a the meat industry's PR agency, has once again pulled off a great coup - this has made barely a blip in the news: That ol' JL Foods listeria recall from the beginning of the month - you know, the one for a measly 200,000 pounds? Well, testing from that plant's production has confirmed listeria ON the poultry products and the recall has been expanded to 4.2 million pounds - in other words, the entire summer's production of turkey products. Scroll - and scroll, and scroll - through this list of the varieties suspected of having the deadly, feces-based bacteria on them and you will be entertained or aghast, or both. Think about it: This is one of the plants that they actually caught. Happy Thanksgiving dinner!

KINDLER, GENTLER SLAUGHTER

Michael Pollan, of "Botany of Desire" fame, has written a thoughtful essay in The New York Times Magazine attempting to resolve the fact of animal slaughtering's unnecessary cruelty with the fact that we enjoy eating animals - at least, some of us do. For the first half of the article Pollan looks at the issue with eyes wide open and sees how lame the pro-meat arguments are, even going so far as to point out that any rationalization for eating meat, no matter how clever, is still a rationalization. Then in the second half he proceeds to provide just such a rationalization, and one which, unfortunately, makes him look like a complete idiot.

In a nutshell, Pollan's brilliant, unheard-of solution is to ignore factory farming, hope it will go away, and eat animals slaughtered personally by an old-fashioned, down-home farmer. This section is so rife with nonsense it's hard to restrain oneself from a point-by-point, but I'll limit it to two things: One, Pollan, who has in previous pages noted AR activists' ability to counter his knee-jerk arguments - because they've been around this issue and heard them all before - thinks he has come up with something the activists have never considered: How happy barnyard animals are to be frolicking in a cute little farm and how terrible it would be to deny them this happiness by not breeding more of them for slaughter. He goes so far as to claim AR activists - stuck in their urban ivory towers - have never seen animals in this state, a hilariously stupid blunder considering the traffic at animal sanctuaries, whose only difference from the environment Pollan lauds is the lack of slaughter in those animal's day planners.

The other point is that Pollan, ignoring the economics of the global situation, pretends that eating only organic and free-range animals is somehow a solution to a life-or-death ethical question. Not only is this bogus, it's been severely undercut by two news stories that appeared shortly after his essay: People buying "organic" beef at an upscale organic-food chain in New York found that they had been swindled into buying cruddy USDA-grade IBP beef because the store had cunningly switched labels; and a UK study found that chickens who spend more time frolicking outdoors are twice as likely to carry Campylobacter, a major - if not THE major - source of food poisoning. Oh well... time to think up another rationale.

DID SOMEBODY SAY... BANKRUPTCY?

All right, that's a little inflammatory, but then so is the practice of quickly cooking burgers, by its very nature. The point is, the epic deflation of McDonald's as bastion of rapacious capitalism, and all-around cultural battering ram, continues apace. The company closes restaurants, lays off workers, lowers prices even more absurdly, yet still gets panned by analysts as well as American consumers, who mostly continue to buy while asleep... but as they wake up, are picking places with more and better choices.

As for French consumers, of course, they simply go ahead and burn the damn place to the ground. Chacun a son gout, I guess.

GET-TOUGH AGRICULTURE DEPT.

On FRIDAY, *cough* at the same time Wampler was re-opening its listeria-outbreak-linked plant here, and the USDA was finalizing a presentation promising War on Listeria - just like the venerable War on E.Coli about three months ago - frustrated USDA inspectors were walking out of the old ConAgra plant in Greeley, CO, forcing the plant to close by their action. What plant was this? Why, the same one that cause the huge, second-biggest-ever recall in July due to, that's right, E.Coli! AFTER the huge recall, the plant had already been cited another 19 TIMES for fecal contamination. As the Denver Post explained in its opening sentence, "The federal government shut down the former ConAgra beef plant in Greeley on Friday after repeatedly finding feces smeared on meat over a period of several months." Don't worry, though, "smear" tastes fine once you cook it.


Really, though, what the hell kind of War is this? Why wasn't the plant closed after its FIRST infraction, post-recall? That's recidivism, isn't it? OK, so they give it another chance to really clean up its act. So why didn't the SECOND citation trigger some kind of stronger action? The THIRD? FOURTH? FIFTH? etc. etc. and etc.! How can anyone take this "agency" seriously?


UPDATE: Tuesday morning, the Denver Post reported that the plant is now reopening, and attempted to answer the number question above (though not, alas, the "seriously" question). An interesting fact I overlooked in the original shutdown story is that the whole thing was timed to coincide with a three-day weekend for the company, so it lost almost no production time. As one inspector said, "It just seems too perfectly planned." I guess that's how it is when you have the USDA as your PR agency. At least they can do something right.

GOT TROUBLE

Bad news about milk continues to pour in, but the US media pretty much ignores it. 900 Russians have just fallen ill from milk products - a pretty big outbreak, no? - and meanwhile, in New Zealand, it's apparently common knowledge that milk helps cause diabetes and autism, as a recent patent fight shows. Meanwhile here the celebs continue to take a check and accessorize themselves to the ongoing damage... OK...

ANOTHER RECALL YOU DIDN'T HEAR ABOUT

Cargill, this time under the nom de guerre of Skylark, again had a pretty big E. coli recall by traditional standards - 110,000 pounds - though not by our new 2002 Monster Recall standards. The news came and went on Friday. What're the odds?

HIGH-PROTEIN DIET KILLS TEENAGER

I was waiting to get a fuller story on this, but as I haven't found it yet, I'll post what is known so far: An otherwise healthy 16-year-old girl collapsed and died after two weeks on a meat-rich low-carb diet. Her doctors expressly blamed the electrolyte imbalance caused by the diet itself and ruled out possibilities such as an eating disorder. I dunno, maybe they're wrong. Maybe some other factor is going to emerge. But it's gotta make ya wonder.