Haha, after bragging on this week’s porncast about hitting a 5 day a week post schedule for a while now, what’s the first thing I go and do?  Yeah, skip 2 days.  I have excuses, but that’s all they are.  Thankfully, Amanda has my back: the cattlemen are getting worried! Well, they were worried in October, which is when the link is from, but they’re probably terrified now.

It seems there’s some contest encouraging people to make up healthy recipes for kids or something.  Honestly, I don’t know, exactly.  I mean, I read the rules, but it starts right off saying that bribes won’t help (but not that they don’t hurt,) and the top prize is only $3,000, and I don’t even write really good blog posts for less than 5, really (this one’s a freebie, and you get what you pay for, you porn searching fiend, you.)

What I do know is this: 1) the recipe categories have theme ingredients, 2) none of these theme ingredients are meat, and 3) the cattlemen are upset, as per the first link.

Why are they upset?  Well, it’s probably pretty obvious, but let’s hear it in their words, straight from the secondary source: “By excluding meat from its healthy kids recipe contest, USDA continues to add to the misconception that meat is over consumed in the U.S.”

Now, I thought pretty much everything was over consumed, but let’s think about that for a minute.  What do you suppose the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association would consider to be the correct amount of consumption?  Their job is to raise beef sales, right?  Logically, if consumption is at x pounds per person, then their job would be to get that number to x+1.  And once it’s at x+1, well, x+2 is looking to be a good target.  In other words, as an unbiased opinion on the proper amount of beef to consume, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association is about as accurate as I am (Me: zero. Them: all of it.)

Also, this complaint was found in Beef Magazine, which was reprinting a story from the Texas Cattle Feeders Association’s October 1 newsletter.  There was a call to submit beef-based recipes to the contest to “show beef working in a healthy diet,” and with the semi-finalists being announced March 1 we’ve got a while to wait to see if anyone from the industry actually steps up and does something other than whine.

(As an aside, while tracking that trail I learned that only 18% of Americans know the proper temperature for cooking beef safely and yet 95% of Americans eat red meat.  If I were American I’d proudly be in that ignorant 82%, but I’ve got a little less at stake.)

This doesn't look like yogurt, but it apparently has something to do with oil sands. Any more investigation would constitute research. Ew.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers has saved itself some embarrassment over some recent ad campaigns after the Advertising Standards people said they weren’t misleading, despite complaints from the Sierra Club of Canada.

How awesome is that?

Oh, let me explain: the ads said that tailings from the oil sands were “essentially like yogurt.”

Some people felt that the ads were trying to compare the tailings to a healthy food, but according to the decision, that’s not the case, and I don’t know how many nutritionists are on the standards committee, but I’m declaring yogurt as healthy as oil sands tailings.

Janet Annesley, CAPP’s vice-president of communications, had this to say: “if some members of the activist community believe we are suggesting tailings are good to eat, that is not our intent,” and clearly, one can interpret this as a condemnation of yogurt.

Folks, did you ever want to just put all the lobbyists from all the industries in a tiny room together, and, I don’t know, Rick Roll them for a few hours?  Wow, me too!

I know very little about the oil sands, and frankly, I don’t know much about the health advantages or disadvantages of yogurt.  I don’t eat the stuff, there are soy versions available, and it’s easier to roll it into the animal cruelty argument anyway.

Except now I can compare them to oil sand tailings, which I find irresistible.  If you’re trying to give up any dairy products, this would be a good comparison to draw up in your head.  Frankly, you probably won’t have to imagine it for long: some dairy marketer is going to get confused about the issue and release black tar yogurt. Uh, as a product in stores, not out of his or her butt.  I just need to make that clear. Because you see, I am in fact 3 years old at times.

Just a quickie today: is it weird to anyone else that there’s a movement to rename type I diabetes and a movement to rename high fructose corn syrup?  No?  Just me?  I know the two aren’t especially related, but still, it seems like a weird connection.  Because I read too many stories, mostly.

More irrelevant news tomorrow, irreverently.

Next they'll hire this guy for their wildlife management program. He's card-carrying and everything!

I mean, it makes perfect sense.  If you’re going to put a health policy in place to combat things like obesity, why not seek out the guidance of the experts in the area, which happen to be the fast- and junk-food companies?  Apparently that’s the game plan in the UK, where McDonald’s and Pepsi have been invited to the policy-setting table.

Critics of the plan are comparing it to handing smoking policy decisions to the tobacco industry, but in my head this is just like Silence of the Lambs, where the FBI enlists the help of Hannibal Lector, who, to be fair, did more to raise the public’s awareness of fava beans than just about anyone.  Also, that story didn’t end well, if I recall.  I was underage when the film came out and the fake ID industry didn’t have a seat at the table when they set up movie ratings.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if The Grimace himself is chairing the meetings, since all policies are going for voluntary compliance, so all this means is that industry will get to set their own targets that they can later fail to meet them, not that anyone will be paying attention anyway.  That said, I’d enjoy seeing a rule that someone in the room has to dress up like The Grimace, just to drive the point home, but I expect we’ll have to wait for technology to do this for them.  To me, this will be the future of augmented reality applications: the ability to overlay Grimace costumes on top of politicians who’ve caved to the fast food industry. Or just Grimace porn. dot com.

Oh, and Americans, please stop laughing at the British.  You know that ban on Happy Meals in San Francisco?  The mayor vetoed it.  People forget that McDonaldLand has a mayor too, and that guy can network like nobody you’ve ever seen.

I’m woefully behind on VP updates, what with the focus on getting Staying Vegan working on a 5 day schedule, but if you feel neglected, well, the Barnivore crowd has even more to be upset about, and they’re a surly bunch of drunks.

Thankfully, Colleen has decided to feed me with delicious internet nonsense, such as the amazingly titled When Tofu Haters Attack, which I just realized is from March of this year, but I’ve already started my brain in motion, and that’s a train you don’t want to see derailed.  Oh, and I wanted to find a funny picture around the theme of train derailment, but what the hell was I thinking there?  It didn’t take long to discover there’s not a lot of funny around that particular theme, nosir.

Anyway, the article’s about media attention on a study about the relative “Greenness” of vegetarian vs meat-based diets, and of course controversy only sells better if it’s tied with a “you’re doing everything fine, don’t change a thing” subtext, so apparently meat is way way greener than, uh, things that are green.  At least, it is if you squint at the Paper of Science just right.  Here’s a money quote: “It was if a study on cardiovascular health urged daily exercise but noted that downhill skiing all day might ultimately be more dangerous than sitting on the couch, and was thus reported with the headline ‘Sitting on couch can be healthier than daily exercise.’”

In the past, I’d be all over every report that said green was green with the “booyah, how you like me now” and every report that tried to go off message would be ripped to shreds, possibly also followed by a “booyah, how you like me now,” but I think we’re better off focusing on other matters these days, if only to stop me from saying, and this is the last time this post, “booyah, how you like me now.”

Here’s the thing: people don’t want to change.  This is because change is hard.  If it’s possible to think that some alternative is worse than what you’re doing, you’re going to tend to hold onto that knowledge, even if it’s flawed reasoning, and even if the comparison is to an incredibly idealized version of what you’re doing now.  Such as a meticulously planned 100-mile meat-based diet that you actually moved to a different part of the world to maintain that makes any vegan meal planning exercise look like a kindergarten book report in comparison.

So this is what I do now (in between sporadic rambly blog posts): I go one on one.  If someone says that my diet isn’t as environmentally friendly as a meat-based one, I make it personal.  ”Really?  OK, those studies base a lot of their conclusions on grass-fed vs grain-fed meat.  That burger you’re eating right now, how was the cow raised?  And what’d you have for breakfast?  How’d that get made?  What was the footprint there?  ’Cause I don’t know the specific acreage required to make the wheat and soybeans in this tofu-vodka pie (my fantasy conversations have AWESOME food in them,) but I think if you’re going to make the case that you’re somehow doing a better job for the planet by being able to reference a pop-science factoid instead of actually doing something, then this is going to be a short, but funny as hell conversation.  Now pass the chocolate ketchup, my Red Bull pancakes are getting cold.”

Soy milk, rice milk, almond milk, hemp milk, oat milk, etc.: they all have one thing in common in that they don’t come out of a nipple, and I can understand some of the dairy industry’s concern over so many “fakers” taking control of “their” word.  Frankly, with the growing number of options out there I’m almost as concerned as they are about dilution of the brand and consumer confusion, because I can see a time where it’s not going to be clear if the “milk” in a product or restaurant dish came from bovine mammary tissue.

That said, I don’t think we needed Fox News’ help resolving the issue:

All kidding aside, I will gladly take the dairy industry’s favourite words and rip them to pieces for whatever purposes I’m in the mood for. We’re talking about a group who, in Canada, made it illegal for margarine to be yellow because it could hurt sales of butter (that law was finally lifted a few years back.) I can’t find mention of this anywhere, but I have suspicions that it took a long time for fortified soy milk to arrive here because of industry lobbying – I do know that they fought the addition of soy beverages to the “milk and milk products” quadrant of the four food groups, and at the end of the day, it’s a marketing issue, not a health one. I don’t know about you, but I’m suspicious of any group’s nutritional claims when they’d willingly withhold nutrients from consumers because they don’t feel that they can compete.

Still, we’d better come up with a better name for soy milk than what Fox suggests. And probably soon: chocolate milk seems to have been replaced with “chocolate dairy beverage” lately, so I suspect something’s up. Or maybe they were just worried we’d come up with new names on their behalves for brown liquid products from an industry that tries not to talk about its other brown liquid byproducts [affiliate link].

Cock.

I share this for no other reason than to gleefully mock those who propogate the “soy makes you gay” rumours: the president of Bolivia has declared that it’s chicken consumption that’s to blame for both homosexuality and baldness in men.

It turns out his theory didn’t come from a misunderstanding of the many uses of the word “cock” in English, but rather from a misunderstanding about hormones added to animal feed. I’d go deeper into the science, such as it is, but it’s pretty irrelevant since many countries have banned the use of hormones in poultry anyway. The ban was probably for health reasons, incidentally, but I doubt “Fear of Gayness” was one of them.

Anyway, he’s an idiot, clearly, but this is the first time I’ve seen chicken “linked” to baldness, so here’s an opportunity to make fun of my favourite cult science meme – the Sharks Don’t Get Cancer book. If you’re new here, the idea is that because sharks don’t get cancer, you should eat shark cartilage and you won’t get cancer either. By the way, sharks do get cancer, but still, there’s now nothing I fear more for the animal advocacy movement than a bestselling book of burger recipes called Cows Don’t Have Combovers, positing that since there are no bald cows, we need to eat them.

And by the way: on the soy/gay thing, to be honest, I think it’s encouraging. 20 years ago, it was vegetarianism that made you gay, according to idiots around the world. I like that we’ve gotten a lot more specific, since it’s a whole lot easier to disprove something like that. The next step will probably be soy eaten with a certain type of fork, and then the remaining scienticians will be laughed off the stage and we can keep enjoying the same meals we’ve been eating all along, with our boyfriends or girlfriends or whoever we like to hang with.

In last Saturday’s TVP, a few stories were shared about the joys of crossing the border when guards find out you’re vegetarian, and I thought maybe this was just bad luck, but then I saw “You are the Homegrown Terrorist Threat” and I’m not so sure. Granted, border crossing issues are by definition pretty orthogonal to domestic terrorism, but the sentiment is the same, especially if you read some of the criteria of things to watch out for. While the sample brochures mention animal rights and environmental extremism as considerations, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch for “not eating meat” to be considered “extremism” in the eyes of some people… On the bright side, we now have something in common with the infidel property rights advocates. Er, unless they’re ranchers.

pirhan reports that KFC has agreed to pay a $341,000 fine and warn consumers that their products contain a suspected carcinogen. The substance in question is called acrylamide, and it’s found in all kinds of things, but what’s really interesting to me is the lawyer’s spin on the situation: apparently paying over a quarter of a million dollars in fines and having to have health warnings on in-store posters is “win-win.” I can’t imagine what possible outcome the company was bracing itself for if they consider that a win. Oh, and if you’re outside of California, don’t hold your breath for warnings anywhere near you anytime soon – while this is clearly, by KFC’s own lawyer’s admission, a “win” for consumers, he isn’t aware of any laws elsewhere that would help KFC to “win” any further.

I don’t think it’s just the veganism talking when I say that the most appetizing parts of a hamburger when you see it on a billboard is the bright red tomato and the vibrant green lettuce – it’s just hard to make beige sexy. If you’re vaguely aware of the science of food styling, you might enjoy this look at several ad vs reality comparison shots of several (animal based) fast foods. Even when I order veggie burgers, I’m often disappointed with the product when it’s actually in front of me.