Grad school types and religious assholes want to convince us that assimilation is mean and racist and makes immigrants betray their cultural roots, but what if they're just really psyched to live somewhere that isn't an abject shithole?Comments/Enlarge |
See all
Now that Ryanair is making transatlantic flights it’s going to be interesting to see how far the BAs and Virgin Atlantics of this world are gonna go to keep their customers.Comments/Enlarge |
See all
You learned in first grade about the magic of the food chain, right? Algae gets eaten by flies get eaten by frogs get eaten by crocodiles get eaten by people get eaten by God, and so on. But that is grossly outdated. Modern life has a different set of way stations in the cycle of consumption. Here are two ways it REALLY works now.
THE NICE LITTLE FARM PATH (Move your cursor over the images below)
THE FACTORY FARM PATH
If you are trying to decide between big farms and small farms, you need to factor in some details that don’t really fit in a food cycle graph.
At the feed yard, your factory calf and 80,000 of his buddies spend the majority of each day crammed in pens where they eat, sleep, and shit. The farm calf is left to wander and graze as he will.
The uniform administration of antibiotics by Cactus Feeders ultimately strengthens the shit-born bacteria besieging factory-calf’s immune system, whereas Dick and Torrey only give medication to li’l farmy if and when he’s actually sick.
The distance covered by the factory path reflects the range of factory-calf’s possible distribution, so that if there’s anything wrong with the industrial frankenbeef before shipping, not only is there no way to trace it back to cow zero, but you’re also left guessing how many other people in how many other places are eating things made from the same issue-meat (hence those million-pound recalls every so often); meanwhile, if you get sick from your burger at the White Dog, all you have to do is call up the chef and crisis averted. It may mean doing a little extra work and being a bit nerdy about where you eat, but in the end keeping it close to home is a pretty fucking good idea.
