Relatable, Now With Electrolytes

Today’s front page of The New York Times has a story on Jeb Bush trying to lose weight, which is fine, I get that the political punditry wants to “humanize” presidential candidates and present a picture of them as “real people.” But this particular a piece of bullshit pissed me off:

The rigid abstemiousness runs the risk of putting him at a dietary distance from an American electorate that still binges on carbohydrates and, after eight years of a tea-sipping president, craves a relatable eater in chief.

What. The. Fuck.

America “craves a relatable eater in chief” who “binges on carbohydrates” like they do? No. I’m going to stop you right there, buckaroo. I don’t know from under which rock reporter Mike Barbaro pulled this piece of conventional wisdom, but let me say: nothing shows how out of touch you are from the rest of America than stupid statements like this. Americans don’t drink tea? Low-carb diets aren’t popular in the U.S.? Have you been to a fucking grocery store lately, buddy? A real one, not one of those little New York City corner delis, I’m talking the goddamn Kroger or Safeway. Do you ever step outside Manhattan for more than two hours?

Can we please stop portraying the American electorate and American politicians in such childish ways?

I am sick of this bullshit that crops up every four years, when the punditry suddenly decides it has its pulse on “real America” and it knows what we “crave” in a presidential candidate, which is to be exactly like their (completely false) image of us. We want to have a beer with them! But not any beer, certainly not one of those gay beers from Yurp, it has to be a manly-man beer! A Budweiser!

Do you people even hear yourselves? Do you hear how insulting that is to us, we Real Americans in the “flyover states,” not to mention how insulting it is to the candidates? Fucking-a.

Memo to the New York Times, writer Michael Barbaro, and the rest of you idiots in the political media: you have no fucking clue what America craves, so stop with the idiotic “real America” framing. You’re making fools of yourselves.

We do not have the luxury of playing that stupid media game this time around. We simply do not have the luxury of pretending to give a crap that the presidential candidate put Dijon mustard on his hot dog instead of a Real Murcan Mustard like French’s (irony alert). We do not have the luxury of debating whether Hillary Clinton should have gone to Taco Bell instead of Chipotle. And I am not going to pretend that because I live in Nashville, Tennessee my diet consists solely of deep fried fat balls and a side of sweet tea. It does not.

I am not going to pretend that I can’t relate to Jeb Bush because he’s on a Paleo Diet instead of binging on microwavable Mac’N’Cheezybits like Real Murcans. I can’t relate to Jeb Bush because he’s a conservative hawk who has embraced the architects of his brother’s Iraq War fiasco. I can’t relate to Jeb Bush because while he claims to favor small government, in actuality he inserted himself into the Schiavo family’s darkest hour. I can’t relate to Jeb Bush because he would return us to the same pro-corporate, pro-wealthy policies that sank the economy when his brother was in the White House.

What he eats for dinner isn’t even on my damn radar, you fools. Stop treating the electorate like idiots.

GMOoooooops

There was a pretty robust discussion about GMOs over here on a recent Good News Friday thread where some longtime friends of the blog likened my anti-GMO stance to the anti-vaccine hysteria we’ve seen take root among less educated segments of the population.

So imagine my surprise to hear this story discussed on the radio today:

GMOSeralini.org welcomes the news of the republication of the chronic toxicity study on the glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup and a commercialized genetically modified (GM) maize, Monsanto’s NK603, led by Prof Gilles-Eric Séralini. The republication restores the study to the peer-reviewed literature so that it can be consulted and built upon by other scientists.

The study found severe liver and kidney damage and hormonal disturbances in rats fed the GM maize and low levels of Roundup that are below those permitted in drinking water in the EU. Toxic effects were found from the GM maize tested alone, as well as from Roundup tested alone and together with the maize. Additional unexpected findings were higher rates of large tumours and mortality in most treatment groups.

The study was first published in Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) in September 2012 but was retracted by the editor-in-chief in November 2013 after a sustained campaign of criticism and defamation by pro-GMO scientists.

Now the study has been republished by Environmental Sciences Europe. The republished version contains extra material addressing criticisms of the original publication. The raw data underlying the study’s findings are also published – unlike the raw data for the industry studies that underlie regulatory approvals of Roundup, which are kept secret. However, the new paper presents the same results as before and the conclusions are unchanged.

The republished study is accompanied by a separate commentary by Prof Séralini’s team describing the lobbying efforts of GMO crop supporters to force the editor of FCT to retract the original publication.

GMOSeralini.org editor Claire Robinson commented: “This study has now successfully passed no less than three rounds of rigorous peer review.

I believe this is the study I mentioned in comments on the GNF post that was derided as being not peer reviewed, pulled by the publisher for sloppy work, etc. Turns out it was pulled due to intensive Monsanto-generated pressure.

Dr Jack A Heinemann, Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics, University of Canterbury New Zealand, called the republication “an important demonstration of the resilience of the scientific community”. Dr Heinemann continued, “The first publication of these results revealed some of the viciousness that can be unleashed on researchers presenting uncomfortable findings. I applaud Environmental Sciences Europe for submitting the work to yet another round of rigorous blind peer review and then bravely standing by the process and the recommendations of its reviewers, especially after witnessing the events surrounding the first publication.”

I continue to maintain that treating the earth like a petri dish with these genetically-modified crops simply for fun and profit is playing with fire.

Weird Advertising Ploy Du Jour

You know how I always say voting for people who hate government is akin to shopping at a vegan butcher shop? Well, one would think that might be the idea behind this London butcher’s shop, where faux human “meat” kinda makes me not want to eat any kind of meat, not for a good, long while.

In honor of Meatless Monday, I give you Wesker and Son, located in London’s Smithfield Market. Click on the link for some really, um, interesting photos. And I’ll post this one picture, just ’cause I’m mean:

Giving New Meaning To The Term “Sausage”

So, what gives? Is this butcher shop courtesy of PETA? Sadly, no:

Annnnnnnd there are the penises. If you’re currently howling “whyyyyyyyyyy?” the answer is “because the Resident Evil 6 video game.” This shop is basically a fucked-up marketing gimmick. Which hardly seems like a sufficient reason.

Oh. A video game. Of course. Why didn’t I think of that?

A Restaurant Chain For The 27%

UPDATE:

Oh, shit.

—————————-

Niche Marketing

So, now that Chick-fil-A has become the latest battleground in the culture wars, I just have to wonder what kind of freak-out is going on in their corporate offices. The battle lines have been drawn — Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum vs the Jim Henson Company, the city of Chicago, the city of Boston, and these three ladies. Now the war has moved to social media sites, where Chick-fil-A has lost control of its Facebook account amid accusations of sockpuppetry.

With bigots and attention whores like Rick Santorum now serving as the face of your brand, I have to wonder if Dan Cathy isn’t wishing he’d kept his fat yap shut? You know, most fast food chains try to appeal to as broad a range of customers as possible. Chick-fil-A is narrowing its consumer base. They are now the face of right-wing, reactionary, Bible-thumping intolerance. Who thinks that’s a good brand identity?

This is a fast food chain which now appeals to the low-information, Fox News-watching, bigoted, spelling-challenged wing of the electorate.

Maybe this explains why they spell “chicken” incorrectly in their ads.

It’s The Ron Paul Family Cookbook!

Not a hoax, apparently this is a real thing. You gotta love a cookbook that includes a chicken recipe submitted by a vegetarian. What could possibly go wrong?

Mrs. Sciulli, despite being a vegetarian, contributed to the 2009 edition Golfer’s Chicken, a dish made of chicken parts coated with powdered onion soup mix, salad dressing and apricot jam. “You have to fall off the wagon now and again,” she said.

I think I just threw up in my mouth.

Or this:

For the traditional White House Super Bowl Party, what about Spicy Crackers? The cookbook says they are simple: Empty a box of saltine crackers into a jug, add 1½ cups of oil, 3 tablespoons of crushed red pepper flakes and a package of dry Ranch dressing mix. Roll the jug around to mix the contents, “allow the crackers to set for several hours and then, enjoy!”

I’d love to but I’m still trying to figure out how to get the damn saltines inside a jug.

This cracked me up:

Peggy Paul said some Ron Paul supporters have told the family they framed their cookbooks. “But then,” she said, “how would you use it?”

Indeed! Then again, the executive chef of Washington’s Ritz-Carlton hotel told the Wall Street Journal he tried a few of the recipes and thinks the book is better framed on the wall than used for meal planning.

Waiter Is That Corexit In My Shrimp Cocktail?

So now it looks like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill did, indeed, contaminate the food chain:

The study, “Macondo-1 well oil-derived polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in mesozooplankton from the northern Gulf of Mexico,” found that oil has contaminated zooplankton, one of the first links in the oceanic food chain.

“Traces of oil in the zooplankton prove that they had contact with the oil and the likelihood that oil compounds may be working their way up the food chain,” Dr. Michael Roman of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science said in a statement accompanying the study.

Baby fish and shrimp feed on the tiny, drifting zooplankton, and then introduce contamination and pollution to the larger sea creatures in the food web.

Those larger creatures also include us, let me point out. Anything that eats shrimp is at risk of getting contaminated. And here we are nearly two years after the fact, and I’m sure a lot of people feel like everything is fine, go ahead and tuck into that shrimp special at your favorite local restaurant. Freedom! But two years is not nearly long enough for any of this stuff to be cleansed from the ecosystem.

I bring this up because I’ve been having a long-running battle with the seafood guys at Whole Foods about this. First, let me say: I rarely eat shellfish anymore because well, they’re seabugs, y’all! That lobster is just a giant cockroach! But Mr. Beale likes it and so I will occasionally cook shrimp for him, and sometimes I can forget crabs are big sea-spiders, if they’re chopped up in a crab cake and I don’t have to see the legs.

But ever since the BP oil spill I have avoided Gulf shrimp, and no amount of “oh you’re just being silly” cajoling will get me to change my mind, because of this:

That Ain't Natural & I Ain't Eating It

This is some gross orange-y gook that I often find when I clean Gulf shrimp and only Gulf shrimp. It looks just like Corexit and is found along the “mud line.” It also discolors the meat around it, and sometimes even a toughens the texture.

Now usually on the rare occasion that I buy shrimp I ask where the shrimp is from and if I’m lucky I can get shrimp from Savannah. Thanks to the USDA’s COOL laws, the store has to tell you where your food is from, and I am eternally grateful for this information (don’t get me started on grapes from Chile, people. That’s a whole ‘nother blog post). But on Monday all Whole Foods had was Gulf shrimp and once again I got into an argument with the guy about what that orange gook is. I even showed him the picture (taken the last time I made the mistake of buying Gulf shrimp), at which point he told me I was being silly and that these were teeny tiny eggs.

That is the second time someone has told me that these are shrimp eggs. Okay look, I know it’s been a few decades since I took biology class and I’m definitely not a fisheries biologist, but the mud line is not where one finds shrimp eggs. The mud line is the shrimp’s GI tract. That “mud” is shrimp shit. Shrimp do not shit out their eggs. If you’re a female shrimp and you have eggs, they are on the other side of your body, where the legs are. In fact, those little tiny legs are called “swimmerets” and are there so females can hold their eggs.

Look:

So people, if anyone tells you that the orange gook in your shrimp are eggs, please show them this picture and ask them how it’s possible, biologically speaking, for eggs to be where feces is. You can also let them that they are full of shit, if you wish. Just like your shrimp.

If you’re a fisheries biologist and can offer me any more insight on what this orange gook is, please weigh in. Until then, I’m going to assume this is some kind of oil-spill related contaminant, because I never saw it before the Deepwater Horizon disaster and I’ve never seen it in any kind of shrimp besides those from the Gulf. And let me be clear: before I started boycotting Florida for being racist fucktards, we used to go to the beach every summer and buy Gulf shrimp from those little refrigerated shrimp stands on the beach. I’ve cleaned a lot of shrimp in my day. But now Gulf shrimp seems to have orange slime in it and I ain’t eating it.

Running On Empty

Hey kids! Yeah I know we’re running out of oil, fresh water, clean air, seafood, certain frog species, sanity, etc. But there are a whole lot of other cool things we’re running out of, too. Here’s a list, just to make your weekend brighter. Cheers!

• IP Addresses: Yes the internet is running out of room, and will hit peak internet in 2012. Apparently they’ve got some kind of solution in the works which is too complicated for me to understand.

• Rare earth elements, which apparently keep Western civilization running. Supposedly China controls 97% of the global supply of rare elements like terbium, lanthanum and neodymium. And they’ve said they’ll stop exporting them in 2012.

• Drugs, as in the pharmaceutical kind. Apparently there are 200 drugs which the FDA lists as in short supply. Last week the manufacturer of Doxil, an important cancer drug, halted production completely at its Ohio manufacturing facility, making a critical shortage even worse. Thousands of cancer patients worldwide are doing without this critical drug.

How can this happen? Aren’t we always told that America has the bestest healthcare system in the whole, wide world?! Aren’t we supposed to be a leader in healthcare innovation? Didn’t Sen. Bob Corker famously call Canada and France parasites on American medical breakthroughs? Isn’t the profit motive supposed to make everything so much shinier?! Repeat those talking points three times, click your heels, and take an aspirin, cancer patients, because you obviously won’t be getting your Doxil for a while.

• Cotton. Drought in China, flooding in Pakistan and production cuts in India are supposedly to blame. But the good news is that this year, production has oustripped demand — just barely. As long as there won’t be any natural disasters in that part of the world, we should be okay for 2012! Oh wow I feel better already! I mean, it’s not like weird shit ever happens over there, right?

• Organs. If you need an organ transplant, good luck. You can stand in line, or you 1%-ers can try to game the system the way Steve Jobs did.

• Bananas. As I wrote a couple years ago, bananas haven’t had sex in 10,000 years and are on the brink of extinction. All bananas in existence today are clones; this makes them increasingly susceptible to disease, pests and the like, as they have no way of evolving natural immunity or resistance to these threats. All bananas are mutants incapable of producing normal DNA: i.e., they stopped evolving. A fungus called Panama Disease is currently wiping out entire plantations.

Irony points to those of you familiar with the famous Kurt Cameron/Ray Comfort video, “The Atheist’s Nightmare.” (Link is to the debunked version, as that’s what came up first in my Google search. I’m sure you can find the original somewhere on the intertubes.)

• Coffee. Coffee is grown all around the world, so how can we be running out? Adverse weather, new pests and fungi are lowering yields everywhere. I don’t think we’ll ever run out completely, but we may be seeing a resurgence of some popular World War II era coffee substitutes like Postum and chicory.

Pay no attention to the climate change wreaking havoc on the food supply!

[UPDATE]:

Oh geez. Apparently the world is running out of toilets. Beam me up, Scottie.