Isn't it kind of odd for a culture that trumpets its 'family values' to treat its children like cattle, fattening them up on corn and soy by-products? We love our kids so much we've let Big Food turn them into cash cows for...

Mothers' Day just kind of depresses me since my mom died unexpectedly several years ago. I still miss her even though we didn't have a lot of common ground; she was a devout Christian Scientist and lifelong conservative, whereas I worship at the...

For a free country, we've got an awfully tyrannical food chain. Our current system of food production is really founded on a contempt for life; it pummels the planet and exploits migrant farm workers, defying the laws of both nature and...

It's a safe bet that diabetics outnumber crackheads in the U.S. by a big fat margin, but the corn cartel's got carte blanche to fill us (and our gas tanks) with their Beltway-blessed by-products. So U.S. drug policies focus more on coke addicts than Coke addicts, despite the fact that...

I hate to be the one to have to tell you this, but this whole Earth Day thing is really just a front for a cabal of dirt-loving luddites determined to destroy life as we know it in America. Dig down below that crunchy granola...

Barbie and I don't have a lot in common. For one thing, I'm biodegradable and she's not. But we do agree on one thing; math is hard. For example, how is it that Lisa Simpson's been a vegetarian for thirteen years when she's only...

Oh, you car-crazy, meat-mad Americans, look what you've done now! Everybody else wants to live the way you do, wolfing down Whoppers behind the wheel. So they're ripping up rainforests to grow more grains for cars and cows, and that's just accelerating global warming, which...

Yes, there's gloating galore in our Mac-happy household over the news that "even the briefest exposure to the Apple logo may make you behave more creatively," according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. No wonder we are just bursting with ideas that our cramped Manhattan...

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulsen's proposed overhaul of our financial markets was unveiled on Monday, a day too early to qualify as an April Fool's Day prank, but it was a joke, nonetheless. Forget about voodoo economics; this is doodoo economics. No wonder...

America suffers from a collective case of do-gooder deafness: we have a hard time hearing a message when it's delivered by a dorky academic or an unattractive activist. We're all ears, though, when celebrities speak out about their pet causes, or their pets, or whatever. So, in acknowledgement of the...

The "Reverend Wright is Wrong" refrain has been repeated endlessly this past week as pundits on both sides weigh in on the racial and religious controversy that's rocked the Obama campaign. Martin Luther King, Jr. touched on this not-so-divine divide 45 years ago:

Ah, politicians and dirt, that delightful duo. I'm talking horticulture, not whores. Forget about the soiled legacy of Eliot Spitzer; consider, rather, the contrasting agricultural approaches of Prince Charles and President Bush.

Prince Charles has been an organic farmer for decades; his

The secret to Jim Hightower's success lies in a style of political commentary best described as "pleasantly apoplectic;" he's mad as hell, but in an ultra-affable way. Who else could stoke a fire in the belly with so many belly laughs?

In our climate change crisis, Hightower's a natural source...

While some of us moan and groan about the unmitigated awfulness of industrial agriculture and our craptastic food chain, others are literally sowing the seeds of an agrarian revival. The idealistic young farmers and gardeners fueling this ag-revolt have been christened "The Greenhorns" by one extraordinary, exuberant young...

There are simple carbohydrates, complex carbohydrates, and then there's the Twinkie, made from military industrial-complex carbohydrates. It's got some of the same ingredients as tracer bullets and artillery shells, as I learned from reading Steve Ettlinger's Twinkie, Deconstructed.

Ettlinger's book, just out in paperback, documents the 39 ingredients it...

Our ever-evolving culture gave me a new verb, a new phrase, and a new acronym last week. The verb is "googlemire," and if you've ever been sucked into the Internet's virtual vortex, you know exactly what it means. Word maven Patricia T. O'Connor used...

Well, of course, where else would you expect to find America's first feng shui'd fast food outlet? A McDonald's in the Los Angeles suburb of Hacienda Heights has opted to bag the golden arches' classic red, yellow, and plast-icky décor in favor of "leather seats,...

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:"

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.)

With the Humane Society's video going viral faster than E. coli in a feedlot, Mendell fired the two employees identified in the video, describing their behavior as "a serious breach of our company's policies and training." California prosecutors have since filed animal cruelty charges against the two former employees, who insist, of course, that they were only following orders.

The individual who shot the footage, who's remaining anonymous in the hopes of infiltrating other slaughterhouses, told the Washington Post, "These were not rogue employees secretly doing these things...Every day, I would see downed cattle too sick or injured to stand or walk arriving at the slaughterhouse. Workers would do anything to get the cows to stand on their feet."

Although the methods exposed by the video are all forbidden by both California law and the USDA, the USDA actually lacks the authority to recall meat; all it can do is ask nicely. Westland has voluntarily agreed to pull all its raw and frozen beef products going back to February 1st, 2006, but most of that potentially downer cow-tainted meat has presumably already been downed.

USDA inspectors were at the Westland plant twice a day and saw nothing amiss, which is to say that these abuses simply constitute business as usual in America's abattoirs. But is this kind of institutionalized cruelty acceptable in our culture? Our pal Bonnie Powell over at the Ethicurean doesn't think so:

At least the animals have got the Humane Society working on their behalf to shame the USDA into action; if only the workers who are getting chewed up and spit out by the factory farms had an equally effective, well-funded watchdog looking out for them.

Powell cites a disturbing six-part expose that ran last week in the Charlotte Observer about a North Carolina poultry processor whose workers are subjected to awful conditions and routinely denied medical care. Many of the workers are here illegally and therefore afraid to speak up, making them easy to exploit. Serious injuries go unreported to OSHA, which is supposed to ensure worker safety but, according to the Observer, "is allowing employers to vastly underreport the number of injuries and illnesses their workers suffer."

The Observer's series followed a strange and scary story in the New York Times about a mystery malady afflicting a dozen workers at a Minnesota pork processing plant. The workers, who suffered a serious neurological disorder, all had one thing in common; part of their job entailed harvesting pig brains, which get shipped to China and Korea, by blasting compressed air into the pigs' skulls, which, according to the Times, turned "the brain into a slurry that squirted out through the same hole in the skull, often spraying brain tissue around and splattering the hose operator in the process."

Powell sums it up best:

Industrial livestock production relies on the systemic abuse of cows, pigs, chickens, and the workers who process them in order to bring us cheap meat. When did Americans develop such a taste for torture, anyway? I'm tired of having to read and write about this stuff; aren't you sick of eating it?

We Americans have a bias against eating bugs -- well, most of us do, anyway. Just try serving your family a batch of homemade granola laced with pantry moth larvae -- I did, and it totally grossed them out. Once these miniscule maggots gatecrashed my granola, I tried to make...

Q. What do tree huggers, animal lovers, nutrition experts, and Michael Pollan have in common?

A. They all want YOU to eat more plants and fewer animals.

This may be a tall order in our "where's the beef" culture, but with meat consumption fingered as a major factor in climate...