Weirdness in food and drink

According to this article, people outside of Ontario (and maybe Quebec and the Maritimes) don't drink milk out of bags. I know some people buy milk in cartons, and others buy it in jugs (although I only know one person who uses a jug), but I thought the bag option was available everywhere. I thought wrong. And people outside of these provinces are getting in a huff about it. Over milk containers? Really? Watch the video that started the kerfuffle:



Meanwhile, in the food world, here's one more thing to make me want to be a vegetarian again:

"The great American hamburger, we are told, is made with "Premium Black Angus patties." The New York Times reported this week that a significant quantity of this meat actually comes from Beef Products, Inc., which sweeps up the scraps from the killing floor, the bits and pieces of the mutant cattle that is being fed anti-biotics and "feed." Until it was banned by the Feds in 1997 because of mad cow disease, "feed" often included chicken feces, poultry feathers, cow blood, horse parts mixed in with soy, peanuts, and cottonseed. But the FDA didn't go far enough and today cattle sold for food can be fed pig and horse blood as well as tallow. The problem with cattle who eat feed rather than the grass nature intended them to eat is that they get sick and so are fed massive doses of antibiotics; but even that isn't enough to stop E.coli infection, so the scraps that end up in hamburgers are treated with ammonia. To quote the Times: "With the U.S.D.A.'s stamp of approval, the company's processed beef has become a mainstay in America's hamburgers. McDonald's, Burger King, and other fast-food giants use it as a component in ground beef, as do grocery chains. The federal school lunch program used an estimated 5.5 million pounds of the processed beef last year alone." Even after all that Mad Cow business they are still trying to turn cattle into carnivores because its cheaper and they get fat sooner, and the poisoned garbage from slaughterhouse floors is being swept up, cooked with ammonia, and sent to school kids. Mmmm. "Quality you can taste." Then you wash it down with a gallon or so of "soda" in a recyclable plastic container made with "high-fructose corn syrup" (because it's cheaper than sugar and has a longer shelf-life.) Oops, now they've found that those soda bottles contain BPA and even aluminum soda cans are lined with it, and oops, the human body thinks that BPA is estrogen. Maybe that's why all those boys have such big boobs, that and the soy milk. Meanwhile Mayor Bloomberg is trying to ban salt! Watch the film Food, Inc. And then lets all move to Sicily."

Yummy. Did you like that? Deeeelicious. (By the way, is it against some law to be quoting so much of an article? I'm a little hazy on the rules.)

And just like that, it's almost lunchtime. What do you say? Burgers and milk?