Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Living on the land - or dying on it

Hi! Everything Wants to Kill You
Published on Wednesday, February 17, 2010 by the San Francisco Chronicle
by Mark Morford
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/02/17/notes021710.DTL

Then I happened to read a charming, albeit nauseating little news item that 
tried to skulk by unnoticed recently, wherein is was announced that the 
Huntington Meat Packing Co. of Southern California was expanding its recall 
of possibly E. coli-tainted meat, from just over 860,000 pounds to ... wait 
for it ... five million pounds.

Five million pounds of bad meat. Sounds like a fun movie title. Or maybe a 
nickname for Congress. While pondering the number, I did some quick math. But 
being lousy at math, I also did some quick research.

All-knowing Google informed me that the average head of cattle, say a 
1,200-pound animal, results in something like 500 pounds of usable meat, give 
or take. Interesting! Or not.

Ergo, five million pounds is the rough and chopped-up output of about 10,000 
animals. Ten thousand head of cattle is, freakishly, only about a tenth -- if 
that -- of what the largest industrial feedlots in Idaho, Texas, California, 
Nebraska and elsewhere have on their tortured and tormented, methane-choked 
properties at any given moment (Broken Bow in Nebraska can hold 85,000 head. 
Simplot in Idaho can process up to 150,000. ConAgra's frightening Montfort 
lot in reeking Greely, Colo. is so big it chokes your very soul). Which is 
just all sorts of disgusting. But there it is.

(Oh and btw, five million pounds of meat is also the equivalent of about 
30,000 average-weighted humans, or one big, sold-out Dave Matthews concert in 
San Jose. Hey, we're all dead meat in the end).

It gets so you lose sight of the scale of things. Five million pounds? Seems 
like a lot. It seems epic and sickening and a little horrifying.

And then you realize that it's not. Really it's just a drop in the giant 
meatbucket that is the Western diet, a thimbleful of the staggering tonnage 
of industrial foodstuffs we consume every day, much of it loaded with poison 
and antibiotics and hormones and environmental burden; that includes millions 
of enormous animals that should be eating grass but are instead being 
force-fed land-ravaging grains and 10 billion gallons of drugs per year so we 
may satisfy our ravenous appetites for far, far more unhealthy meat than we 
actually need.

Which in turns makes you sort of amazed that there aren't more meat recalls, 
more epidemics and outbreaks, more McDonald's restaurants spontaneously 
combusting from all the chemicals. It makes you wonder why the hell we aren't 
all dead right this very moment. Perhaps we are? Wait, is this heaven? Nah. 
Just the Internet.

Speaking of McDonald's. Did you hear? A woman was sitting in the McDonald's 
over in the Great Mall in Milpitas just recently, consuming her 
capitalism-approved portion of hormone-blasted industrial feedlot beef and 
HFCS-injected everything (though, to be fair, it could have been one of their 
"healthy" prepackaged nuclear salads), when, of course, she went into labor.

And she gave birth, right there in the food court, in the McDonald's, in a 
giant suburban shopping mall, because there is possibly no more 
quintessentially American scenario than birthing a human being in a fast food 
outlet in a shopping mall food court, unless she also happened to be thinking 
about firearms, watching "American Idol" and listening to Dave Matthews 
whilst something something NASCAR.

Reading that story, it was impossible for me not to note how this woman, this 
divine fertile feminine life force, was likely consuming some of the worst 
possible processed foodstuffs imaginable right up to the moment she birthed a 
human baby -- a child, we can politely surmise, that had been nourished 
though much of its gestation by a veritable pharmacy of bloodstream toxins, 
fats and salts and corn syrups, synthetic flavorings and hormones from that 
selfsame feedlot beef.

Do you think this new mom was also was perhaps drinking a fine beverage made 
by the Coca-Cola corporation at the moment of labor pains? Sipping maybe a 
Dr. Pepper or a Sprite? The odds are reasonably good she was, a Coca-Cola 
product being something of a prerequisite to browsing Champs, Foot Locker and 
Kay Jewelers in any shopping complex in modern America.

Mmm, soda. Have you heard that soda is the new tobacco? A demon in angel's 
clothing? Well, it is. Quite the sickening swill, really, far more unhealthy 
and dangerous than we readily acknowledge because gosh, how can something so 
happy, so all-American, so polar-bear Christmastime Homer Simpson 
I'd-like-to-teach-the-world-to-sing wonderful, possibly be all sorts of 
cancerous and sickening and Sarah Palin-grade wrong? Well, it is.

Like cigarettes, they say soda is in dire need of regulation, heavy taxation, 
warning labels, the works. Do you imagine Coca-Cola cares all that much about 
the anti-soda campaign being waged against its wares right now? Hell yes, it 
does. But maybe not as much as you think, given how it has pretty much maxed 
out the U.S market anyway. After all, how many blue sports drinks, pink 
energy beverages and nefarious Coke Minis can you cram down one country's 
gullet? We simply can't get much less healthy. Time to move on.

And so it did. The Coca-Cola company just reported big profits last quarter, 
despite how there's no one left in America to poison (except the tiny, 
precious children). Do you know how it did it? Can you guess how it made more 
millions? That's right: by slowly poisoning India, China and Brazil.

They call them "emerging markets," because these countries are just now 
emerging from millennia of drinking various liquids that were not exceedingly 
good at killing them by way of high fructose corn syrup and unpronounceable 
chemical additives. What, the western gift of fast food, industrial meat and 
oil dependency weren't enough? Let's give them all diabetes and obesity and 
even worse teeth? Fabulous. Have a Coke and a smile, indeed.

It doesn't really matter. Might as well eat that industrial burger and inhale 
a giant Coke as you speed down the freeway in your tiny Japanese car. Do you 
know why? Because your airbag may kill you anyway.

Amid the furor over Toyota's massive recall of stuck accelerator pedals, a 
lesser-seen item about Honda Motor Corporation, itself quietly recalling 
about a half-million Accords and Civics over dangerously high airbag 
pressure, which they say could knock you dead if deployed.

Wait, what? Death by airbag? Isn't that just a little bit of irony overload? 
Isn't that a comedy routine somewhere? In hell, perhaps? Then again, it would 
be a simply spectacular way to go, really, if you think about it, if you 
really love irony, if you think God is basically just a wickedly devious 
cosmic trickster. I mean, why the hell not?

It all balances out in the end, anyway. It's all just the grand and dreamlike 
circus spinning and laughing and churning its cotton candy profundity into 
the Void. For every adult human ironically sent to the great feedlot in the 
sky by a misbehaving automotive safety device, a child is born in a shopping 
mall food court, pre-addicted to Quarter Pounders, ready to take on the 
overheated, surreal world all over again. And lo, the great play continues ...