Weekly Pulse: DIY Abortions on the Border, Pawlenty Screws MN on SexEd
by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Women on along U.S.-Mexico border are buying black market misoprostol to induce abortions, according to a new report by Laura Tillman in the Nation. The drug is easily available over the counter in Mexico.
Delving into food politics and culture for this evening, as we enter the summer grilling season, this vegetarian has noticed two rules of thumb among some carnivorous friends of mine I keep hearing:
1. He doesn't eat meat, so he must not know how to marinate/grill it.
2. I love vegetarian food you make- that roasted butternut squash apple soup is yummy!- but I could never go to a vegetarian restaurant.
On the first, what I think some folks forget is that a lot of vegetarians- I'd even wager most- actually grew up eating, and yes, even cooking, meat. For me, it was 20 whole years. I do know what good chicken, burgers, buffalo wings, polish sausage taste like- heck, once in awhile I can even imagine eating it. Due to my father's impressive marinating skills, I've even got a few recipes up my sleeve, and I can sure handle a grill. Can't say the same for everyone, but no need to assume just because one doesn't like something, it means they don't know what to do with it.
On the second, this is something I noticed in college, but as there have been a couple of no-meat establishments sprung up recently, it's popped back in my head. When I invite people over for dinner, I usually don't tell them I don't serve meat (unless it's a special occasion, like someone's birthday). They usually leave pretty darn full and content with all the dishes I've made. But if I invite them to meet for dinner at a new restaurant that's vegetarian, suddenly it's a whole other world. "I wouldn't know what to eat at a vegetarian restaurant," one friend told me. "But I'm not a vegetarian," said another. True story.
It goes into what I think is perhaps a negative connotation with vegetarianism, that it's an exclusive culture of PETA members who frown at their friend's plates or something. When I was younger and I was in the kind of place where they didn't serve a lot of decent non-meat entrees (salad and pasta with sauce were basically it), I would sometimes literally tell the server I was allergic to meat so as to entice their sympathy and in hopes the chef might whip me up something great. I did that because whenever I told them I was a vegetarian, I got a look of disgust and sometimes an eyeroll, and salad/pasta with sauce is what I ended up with. Again, non-meat might be fine- or even people concerned about their heart choosing to not order red meat for the evening- but vegetarian is like a cult.
It's an interesting food culture in which we live. I think it's important to define vegetarians by their food choices. It's the same food choices as when as you may choose not to eat Chilean sea bass because it's endangered, or choose to cut down on red meat for health reasons. I see it as that more than any kind of label or belief system.
This is an open thread on food culture and your own stories- vegetarians and carnivores alike!- on it.
Everywhere I travel in Africa, there's increasing acknowledgement about the importance of nutrition when it comes to treating HIV/AIDS. Many retroviral and HIV/AIDS drugs don't work if patients aren't getting enough vitamins and nutrients in their diets or accumulating enough body fat.
According to Dr. Rosa Costa, Director of the Kyeema Foundation in Mozambique, many farmers are often too sick to grow crops, but "chickens are easy."
Unlike many crops, raising free-range birds can require few outside inputs and very little maintenance from farmers. Birds can forage for insects and eat kitchen scraps, instead of expensive grains. They provide not only meat and eggs for household use and income, but also pest control and manure for fertilizer.
McDonald's is hoping to change the way consumers view fast food. In partnership with the E-CO2 Project, an independent U.K. consulting firm, the company is launching a three-year study to assess methane production from beef cows in the United Kingdom, as well as ways to reduce livestock production of the greenhouse gas.
A burger joint famous for drive-thru windows and Happy Meals is certainly not the first business that comes to mind when one thinks about environmental sustainability. But with increasing mainstream awareness of the negative consequences of beef production for both human health and the environment, the fast-food giant is looking to reposition itself as leader of green business models.
McDonald's purchases beef from more than 16,000 British and Irish farmers, who raise their cattle in large feedlots. The methane gas produced by livestock accounts for an estimated 4 percent of the U.K.'s total carbon emissions. McDonald's hopes that the results of the study will help guide efforts to reduce suppliers' methane production. The initiative also will likely help "green" the corporation's image in the minds of an increasingly environmentally conscious public.
I'm confused. Is today Presidents' Day, or Groundhog Day? The news cycle's stuck in a wretched rut: the aftermath of yet another school shooting; another suicide bombing in Afghanistan; another story about how the FDA left a dangerous drug on the market while thousands died needlessly; oh, and yet another beef recall.
But this recall--143 million pounds of beef from a California meat-packing plant-sets a new record. The previous record was a mere 35 million pounds, back in 1999.
Will the meat from the Westland Meat Packing Company in Chino make you sick? Depends on what the meaning of "sick" is. If, by "sick", you mean, will it give you mad cow disease, or E. coli, or salmonella? There's only a "remote possibility," according to Dick Raymond, undersecretary of agriculture for food safety.
If, however, by "sick," you mean nauseated by the gut-wrenching undercover video depicting Westland employees abusing "downer" cows--i.e. those too ill or injured to stand ( and perhaps not fit to eat)--well, then, the answer is definitely yes. The footage, brought to you courtesy of the Humane Society, shows workers "kicking cows, jabbing them near their eyes, ramming them with a forklift and shooting high-intensity water up their noses in an effort to force them to their feet for slaughter," as CNN reports.
Westland Meat's president, Steve Mendell, was naturally shocked, shocked, at the evidence of bovine water boarding and other agribiz atrocities documented by the Humane Society. When confronted about the video by the Washington Post, Mendell "expressed disbelief that employees used stun guns to get sick or injured animals on their feet for inspection:"
"That's impossible," he said, adding that "electrical prods are not allowed on the property."
Asked whether his employees use fork lifts to get moribund animals off the ground, he said: "I can't imagine that."
Asked whether water was sprayed up animals' noses to get them to stand up, he said: "That's absolutely not true."
"We have a massive humane treatment program here that we follow to the nth degree, so this doesn't even sound possible," Mendell said. "I don't stand out there all day, but to me it would be next to impossible."
Well, sure, as the head of a meat-packing plant, Mendell is too busy generating his own brand of bullshit to wade into the fecal matter coating the downer cows his company's been slaughtering and shipping off to school lunches and programs for the needy (guess they won't be getting another one of those Supplier of the Year awards for the National School Lunch Program like the one the USDA gave Westland for the 2004-2005 school year.)
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