Can it be true that there are whispers about Nancy Goodman Brinker, founder of Susan G. Komen, suing Planned Parenthood for harassment over the use of the words “pink slime”?

While the world waits with bated breath, we all place orders for bean burgers, hold the mayo.

it’s 1956 and “we’ll all be starving some day”.

it’s 2012 and obesity is considered a major health problem for american children as well as for american adults and pink slime played a role in that developinment.

learning how to make salable food out of bits and pieces of offal was never about feeding more people;

it was about making money by selling people hidden slaughter house floor scrapings as part of “hamburger” – beef and pink slime on a sesame seed bun.

if novak wanted to write about activities that saved millions from starvation, he could write about norman borlag, about IRRI in the philippines, about ir-8 rice, about wheat in mexico.

he could write about agricultural science and agricultural engineering (did you know that getting crops to dry adequately is a major food and health problem in many countries?). these two disciplines truly have put food on tables, but not for profit or for increasing corporate profit margin.

novak should be embarrassed by this half-assed piece of contrarian sophistry. but he probably isn’t.

Beef is a wildly inefficient way to deliver protein to the human diet. Among other problems, they are fed on federally subsidized, mono-cultured, genetically-modified corn/maize (about 90% of which comes from patented seeds “owned” by Monsanto); growth hormones and antiobiotics. All those things are delivered, as is the resulting beef, via federally subsidized gasoline.

Factory-raised cattle that form part of the bovine protein delivery system are housed and fed as if they were geese reared for liver to make foie gras. One reads about the campaign to stamp out foie gras, but not industrial beef. These cattle are slaughtered just before their over-corn-fed livers give out, often by undocumented workers that work in near windowless abattoirs in the prairie hinterlands, far from newspaper reporters, TV cameras, unionizers, both FDA and OSHA inspectors.

Grass-fed cattle produce, however, wonderful steaks. But beef remains an inefficient way to convert sunlight into feed into protein. At least they and the meat they yield don’t suffer from the industrial methods adopted by agricultural and chemical company monopolists that deliver the bulk of grocery store meats, poultry and fish, just as they deliver over-processed corn, corn sweeteners, corn starches and corn-based preservatives in the form of breakfast cereals and virtually every other commodity in the middle 2/3’s of the average grocery store’s shelves.

The issue is not efficiency or lower prices, but nutrition. The American/Western diet is a disease, not a cure. Its sweetener content, most of which is corn-based, is great for dentists and obesity service providers. But it won’t yield anything like mom’s chicken soup circa pre-1945. As for the pink slime, I thought the most popular Soylent product was the green stuff.

The realization that beef is a terribly inefficient way to provide Americans with protein was recognized even before the 1970s.

My science teachers made sure we heard about that in the mid-60s.
I eat a lot of turkey and chicken – beef is more of a treat. But my burgers are usually In-n-Out, which makes their own, so no ‘pink slime’. (AFAIK.)

Totally OT – Via Ellen Nakashima and Joby Warrick of the WaPo:

Al-Qaeda’s online forums go dark for extended period

“Al-Qaeda’s main Internet forums have been offline for more than a week in what experts say is the longest sustained outage of the Web sites since they began operating eight years ago.

No one has publicly asserted responsibility for disabling the sites, but the breadth and the duration of the outages have prompted some experts to conclude that the forums have been taken down in a cyberattack — launched perhaps by a government, a government-backed organization or a hackers’ group…”