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  • Why the meat industry sells salmonella

    Last week, the latest massive food safety recall hit the news -- 36 million pounds of ground turkey possibly tainted with salmonella, courtesy of meat giant Cargill. Some media outlets reported that it's currently legal to sell salmonella-tainted meat. While the meat industry might like it that way, that's not the entire story.

  • How the meat industry turned abuse into a business model

    As a long-time student of the meat industry, I read Ted Genoways' extraordinary article on conditions at the "head table" of a factory-scale pig-processing plant with delight. As a human being, my reaction was revulsion.

  • Great places, great food: part one

    Is this your idea of a great place? Didn’t think so.Photo: Robert TerrellDavid Roberts has been sketching out a positive, unifying agenda for progressives under the banner of what he calls “great places.” It isn’t enough, David argues, to rail against the snarling philistinism of Sarah Palin or engage endlessly in the “decrepit political arguments […]

  • Will the U.S. hog industry ever kick its reliance on low-dose antibiotics?

    The editors of Scientific American recently encouraged U.S. hog farmers to “follow Denmark and stop giving farm animals low-dose antibiotics.” Sixteen years ago, in order to reduce the threat of increased development of antibiotic resistant bacteria in their food system and the environment, Denmark phased in an antibiotic growth promotant ban in food animal production. […]

  • Canned unicorn meat finally horns its way into the meat market

    Remember the sloppy public relations job the National Pork Board did in response to canned unicorn, "the new white meat"? You can finally enjoy that sparkly unicorn taste you've been missing out on!

  • With the global climate pact dead, China gets hungry for U.S. factory pork

    China's growing appetite for meat -- and its rapid conversion to U.S.-style industrial meat production -- may prove just as damaging to the climate as its growing proliferation of cars. The only winners will be U.S. exporters of cheap corn and cheap pork.

  • Big Pork squeals over unicorn-meat marketing. Yes, unicorn meat.

    We’ll have a rainbow roast, please!(ThinkGeek.com)One has to feel sorry for Big Pork. First there was that nasty swine flu that put everyone off pork chops, even though the industry managed to get the name changed to H1N1. Profits are down for producers like Smithfield. Despite America’s love affair with all things bacon, pork consumption […]

  • Jonathan Safran Foer on his book ‘Eating Animals’

    If you’re a meat eater, don’t read Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book Eating Animals. Unless, that is, you are a meat eater curious about the health of your body, the planet, or the animals you consume. The acclaimed author of Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Foer, has been an on-again, off-again […]

  • Meat, climate change, and industry tripe

    Washington Post food-politics columnist Ezra Klein has taken a stand: people should eat less meat, because of its vast greenhouse gas footprint. To make his case, Ezra cited the FAO’s landmark “Livestock’s Long Shadow” report, which found that global meat production is responsible for 18 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions. To be honest, when […]