Bad News for Bacon Lovers (and good news for pigs) from the World Health Organization

Click here for more details from The Guardian today: 

"Processed meats rank alongside smoking as cancer causes – WHO"

A Holiday Shopping Suggestion

This chart explains why I'm doing all my holiday shopping here or here.

"... if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film..." another quote for the day

If there's any justice in the world, then Jonathan Safran Foer's first work of nonfiction (after the brilliant novels Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) will do to factory farms what Rachel Carson's Silent Spring did to DDT. At least it should turn a significant percentage of its readers into vegetarians and vegans. Or at the very least it will create more conscious eaters.

I finished reading this book on the train from work tonight. I couldn't return it to the library without sharing at least one quotation:

"Perhaps in the back of our minds we already understand, without all the science I've discussed, that something terribly wrong is happening. Our sustenance now comes from misery. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film. We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory -- disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own."

-- Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals(p. 143)

But please consider reading the entire book. It should be widely read and it deserves to have a place in our national conversation.

TBL Helps You with Your New Year's Resolution (if your resolution is to become a vegetarian)

To reinforce your resolve to stick to a diet in twenty ten that's better for you and animals and the planet, you don't even have to read all of Jonathan Safran Foer's new book Eating Animals. Simply read this short article on AlterNet today: "Yummy! Ammonia-Treated Pink Slime Now in Most U.S. Ground Beef."
Actually, maybe you don't even have to read the whole article, just read the title of the article again.

You're Welcome.