Hi! Everything Wants to Kill You

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 ...