Serving shit to the masses

On October 4th, the New York Times ran a front-page story about a 22-year old Minnesota woman who ended up partially paralyzed as a result of eating an E. Coli-contaminated hamburger manufactured by Cargill and sold by Wal-Mart to her mother.

I am far past the point of having any illusions about our industrial agricultural complex; I have long understood that sadism and contamination are part and parcel of '...cheap, affordable, readily available...' meat products. But I have to say, the Times article made me realize how unconscionable—almost uniquely among the purulent array of filth-laden animal products available on grocery store shelves—ground meat, a.k.a., hamburger is.

The Times article describes a process of lowest-common denominator products being melded together in a process that exactly mimics that of making compost, where the ideal is to produce the largest amount of broken surface area and to thoroughly mix decomposing bacteria throughout the entire mass so they can begin multiplying exponentially as quickly as possible.

I am, by no means, a vegetarian—anyone who knows me will attest to that. I love meat. And I am not an evangelist of vegetarianism or veganism. If you want to eat meat, that's your decision. But by DOG, if you intend to ever eat another bite of commercially-produced meat, you owe it to yourself to read the entire article before you eat any more @#$%^&* hamburger. SERIOUSLY. The whole piece is so infuriating that to quote here and there doesn't begin to do it justice. You just have to read the whole damn thing, but here's the basic take-away from the Agricultural Industrial Complex:

It's up to you to cook this junk until it's dead, because it's just not cost effective for us to keep SHIT out of it, understand?

There's not a prison dark enough for these bastards. Honestly.