It seems like vegetarians have an image problem; they’re feminine.

In an effort to encourage men toward better, healthier diets, it is necessary to make veggie burgers and salads more masculine.

“In the (distant) past, meat was associated with strength. It was important for males to have more muscles than females in our social evolution — for hunting and fighting,” said Wansink, the John S. Dyson endowed chair of marketing at Cornell University. “That association remained — not between protein and muscles but between meat and muscles. It started a long time ago and it’s still powerful today.”

Hormones in meat have been met with resistance and controversy.

Arguments on both sides of the issue have led to heated debate about the safety of hormones in use in factory farms.

In this article the author attempts to compare synthetic bovine growth hormone (RbST) with naturally occurring bovine (bST), hormone and hormones in plants and humans (HGH).

Felicia Stoler doesn’t acknowledge the slippery slope of problems created by the techniques of factory farming which lead to a torrent of ills.

The debate over whether to treat cattle with antibiotics is interesting – considering many of us would treat our pets with antibiotics if needed – why not livestock?

Antibiotics wouldn’t be necessary if cattle were fed grass instead of “feed” which contains corn, which cows can’t digest which causes bloat and extremely fast growth which leads to infections.

Artificially manipulating lactation for milk production also causes infection which demands antibiotic treatment, and this doesn’t even address the amount of puss from infection which is allowed into the food supply.

And, by the way, we don’t eat pets.

Time to re-evaluate our standards!

The USDA is defending the use of “pink slime”

The USDA, schools and school districts plan to buy the treated meat, categorized as “lean fine textured beef,” from South Dakota’s Beef Products Inc (BPI) for the national school lunch program.

The BPI product makes up about 6.5% of the 112 million pounds of ground beef that has been contracted for the National School Lunch Program, the USDA said.

There has been much debate over the ammonia washed, lean, fine, texturized beef.

The USDA’s defense of the safety of this product draws attention to the standards and practices of the agency.

The “pink slime” as it’s being called has caused quite the furor on the internet.

Parents and activists are alarmed to find out that this combination of meat by-products and ammonia hydroxide is being served to children in school lunches because the U.S Department of Agriculture continues to purchase it.

This “high risk product” has not passed food inspection findings, however, the U.S.D.A. commissioned a separate study to assess the safety of BPI’s “Lean Beef Trimmings” to make it appear safe.

Custer said he first encountered the product — which gained fame recently as “pink slime” in part due to the efforts of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver — back in the late 1990s. Despite voicing his concerns to other officials at the food inspection service, however, the USDA ruled that Lean Beef Trimmings were safe. “The word in the office was that undersecretary JoAnn Smith pushed it through, and that was that,” Custer said.

Appointed by President George H.W. Bush in 1989, Smith had deep ties with the beef industry, serving as president of both the Florida Cattlemen’s Association and the of the National Cattlemen’s Association.

“Scientists in D.C. were pressured to approve this stuff with minimal safety approval,” Zirnstein said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that the National Beef Packing Co. has recalled 60,424 pounds of ground beef products after inspection at an Ohio processing plant revealed potentially dubious signs of contamination by e.coli 0157:H7 bacteria.

The beef was shipped to distributors nationwide for further processing and distribution.

Without more regulation of the food industry and especially factory farms, this will become a much more common occurrence.

Recalls are costly and contamination can often be deadly.

Unbridled by regulation the population continues to be subject to illness and death.

How much longer can we afford to consume without conscience?