Meet your meat!

[nunechka]

anybody remember "Supersize Me"? remember they had some european people on and they were saying that mcdonalds sells smaller burgers in europe and other places around the world compared to here in the US.

CRAZY!!!

[violette829]

OMG Why did I watch that?

[Anonymouse]

anybody remember "Supersize Me"? remember they had some european people on and they were saying that mcdonalds sells smaller burgers in europe and other places around the world compared to here in the US.

CRAZY!!!

Just what exactly is so glorious with "Supersize Me" that the socialistic lefties always harp on McDonald's for?

[Anonymouse]

Here is a nice article to all you whiners about the horrors of food

Libertarian Food

by Brad Edmonds

Meat, fat, salt, hot peppers, and alcohol:

These are the primary foods hated by the hyper-greens and the health natterati. I’ve written about all of them. "Meat is what’s for dinner," "a day without fat is like a day without sunshine," "salt is the other white meat," "hot peppers are addictive," and "got alcohol?" are my favorite mantras.

Each of these primary food groups – nutritional necessities, I should say – makes some kind of libertarian point, thumbs a philosophical nose at the nannying establishment, or just makes me happy.

Eating meat says several important things and actualizes ideas without which we couldn’t live happily or healthily: The act is pleasurable and healthful in itself; it is our tacit (or explicit) assertion that yes, we humans, having consciousness, souls, and a moral sense, are at the top of the food chain; and it provides a connection with the whole ashes-to-ashes, corporeal nature of our short life on earth. Life feeds on life. No mammal can survive without consuming once-living tissue.

Fat is nutritious and delicious, and its consumption is an act of defiance. The think-tank food nannies come out with a scare report every few years about tropical oils, movie-theater popcorn, Big Macs, and the like, and their reports only fuel sales. I’ll learn to eat something I don’t like whenever the food nannies tell me it’s evil. I’ll never outgrow being rebellious in that way. I always wore seatbelts before it became a law; now, I’m wearing one about half the time.

Reduce your salt intake! Reduce your salt intake! Don’t you believe it. If your doctor tells you you must, do what he says only until you get a second opinion. Without dietary salt, we die in a hurry. And it’s lovely: You enjoy the taste of big kosher bricks of it stuck to a giant soft pretzel; it has a flavor of its own (the only rock for which we have specialized taste receptors); and used properly, it acts as an electrolyte to help us taste food. You often don’t know it’s there, but you’d sure know if it wasn’t.

Almost nobody rails against hot peppers. That’s unfortunate, because I might enjoy them even more if someone told me not to. But I can’t really imagine enjoying them more than I do already. Red Louisiana hot sauces are great on everything. I embarrass myself regularly by asking for hot sauce in the nicest restaurants. Perhaps food heat is addictive – it makes you release pleasure and pain-killing neurotransmitters, much like tobacco and chocolate. I’m an addict, and will remain so, unapologetically, until death. If I get ulcers and can’t take the heat any longer, I’ll get a medical degree and invent the first artificial stomach.

And then there’s alcohol. I haven’t tested this assertion, but I’m betting that there have been more words printed, and hours of creative labor expended, over alcohol than over any other primary food group. We’ve been brewing beer and making wine for thousands of years. There are printed periodicals devoted to the enjoyment of specific booze genres. You can probably earn a college degree (or equivalent) somewhere in the art of whisky tasting and commentary. If not, it’s a moral imperative that such a program be developed immediately. Aromatic vegetables, the sort you might use in a mirepois, release some of their flavors in water, some in fat, and others in alcohol. Alcohol thus is as much of a necessity in cooking as are water and fat. And, of course, booze is a wonderful accompaniment to any meal. A Bloody Mary is breakfast booze.

Cooking reaches its zenith when an entrée includes some representative of each of the five primary food groups. Tex-Mex chili? Beef, bacon fat, salt, jalapenos, and beer. Walnut chili? Beef, butter, salt, jalapenos, and wine. You’d be surprised how many classical dishes call for some kind of hot pepper: You’re simply not allowed – it is immoral – to create a béarnaise or hollandaise without cayenne pepper.

Classical cuisine tends to underprescribe hot pepper content, of course. Like exercise and heroin, the more hot peppers you consume, the more you need to get your fix. Hot pepper training should be as fundamental as the three Rs for children.

So celebrate rebellious, delicious, healthful libertarian cuisine at your very next opportunity: Create a dish (or enjoy one at a restaurant) that includes all five of the real primary food groups. You can’t help but be happier and healthier for it.

[ckBejug]

Just what exactly is so glorious with "Supersize Me" that the socialistic lefties always harp on McDonald's for?

Dude, the guys liver turned into pate! I love a good burger or juicy steak too, I am all for being omnivores! Mikee-D's is just craaap. *barf* Fast food can be good and easy and cheap and no one in their right mind should eat it every day, of course, but damn his blood tests were scary.

[Anonymouse]

Dude, the guys liver turned into pate! I love a good burger or juicy steak too, I am all for being omnivores! Mikee-D's is just craaap. *barf*

So what? Why is McDonald's somehow "evil" for it? It's no esoteric knowledge that if you eat alot of junk food repeatedly, you will face consequences, in his case he did it for a long time, constantly, so what should we expect? The average consumer would never do that. But like all the environmentalists, lefties, and socialists, the constant attack on food, and capitalism must never reach a halt.

[ckBejug]

So what? Why is McDonald's somehow "evil" for it? It's no esoteric knowledge that if you eat alot of junk food repeatedly, you will face consequences, in his case he did it for a long time, constantly, so what should we expect? The average consumer would never do that. But like all the environmentalists, lefties, and socialists, the constant attack on food, and capitalism must never reach a halt.

Actually, the 'average' consumer does jsut that. You don't need to eat out for every single meal of the day to get an a$$ the size of texas and a ton of health problems. Some crazy percentage of Americans eat out 3 or 4 meals a week. That is so bad. This all started because those dumba$$ girls ate too much McDonalds and got sick and fat because of it so they sued the company. I thought that was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard of. They should have kept their mouth shut or eaten better, not fast food. So I don't believe the company is responsible for making people ill, that is stupid people and their pea-brained inability to make healthy choices. It's good they took away the super size option since apparently people don't know how to make good choices and would eat all that freaking food if it was put in front of them. McDonalds is a big company and as all big companies it is looking to make another buck. Nothing can change that. However people could be educated enough to make wiser decisions about what they put in their bodies and not eat so much fast food. Maybe fast food places should have warning labels like cigarettes...

[Anonymouse]

Getting Fat From the War on Capitalism

by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

Socialists of all stripes have long waged an ideological war against personal responsibility, for if it is true that adults cannot and should not be held responsible for their own decisions, then the argument can be made that the state should step in and control virtually all aspects of peoples’ lives. If people can’t make sensible decisions regarding the feeding and education of their children, the state should step in. If they can’t prepare for their own old age, the state should do it for them. If they can’t find suitable employment, the state should be "an employer of last resort"; and on and on.

In recent years the intellectual class that helps to prop up the state (in return for employment, money, prestige, research grants, and other favors) has figured out a recipe for destroying two of the most important impediments to totalitarian statism – personal responsibility and the rule of law – in its pursuit of totalitarian control over everyone’s lives. Its first victim was the tobacco industry.

Everyone has known for decades, if not centuries, that cigarette smoking is hazardous to health. It has been common knowledge for decades that smoking dramatically increases the risks of lung cancer, lung disease, heart disease, and other ailments. Although smoking is generally regarded as addictive, literally tens of millions of Americans have kicked the habit because of these well-known health concerns. There are more former smokers in America than smokers.

This is why, for some forty years, juries did not award monetary damages to diseased smokers who sued the tobacco companies. Jurors understood that adult smokers recognize the health risks of their habit, are willing to accept them, and should take responsibility for the consequences.

But "public health activists," a part of the statist intellectual class that is either employed by government or by government-subsidized nonprofit groups, waged a successful, decades-long crusade to demonize the tobacco companies. As a result, starting in the mid 1990s, various state legislatures passed laws that essentially declared the notion of personal responsibility to be defunct in cases where smokers sue the manufacturers of cigarettes.

Florida was the first state to enact such legislation (See Robert A. Levy, "Tobacco Medicaid Litigation: Snuffing Out the Rule of Law," Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 275, June 20, 1997). As legal scholar Robert A. Levy has pointed out, Florida’s "Medicaid Third-Party Liability Act" abolished the notion that defendants should be able to raise a defense. Tobacco companies were prohibited from defending themselves by arguing in court that smokers are aware of the health risks of cigarette smoking. According to the law, "assumption of risk" and "all other affirmative defenses normally available to a liable third party are to be abrogated," writes Levy.

The Florida law also threw out another age-old tenet of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence: the idea that harm against an individual must be proven before that individual can be awarded damages in a liability case. Instead, "statistical analysis" can be used to "prove" that a particular consumer product "harmed" the state budget!

Of course, one can never "prove" anything with statistics; one can only speak in terms of probabilities. More ominously, the law stipulated that if a mere statistical correlation (forget about even discussing causation) can be found between the incidence of smoking-related diseases and state Medicaid expenditures, then the state can sue the tobacco companies to "recover" these expenses (presumably, Medicaid paid for part of the hospital expenses of lung cancer victims).

No individual victim need be identified; the state can "seek recovery of payments" based on a "class of victims;" there is no statute of limitations; and private attorneys can be paid up to 30 percent in contingency fees on such lawsuits.

Soon after Florida passed this rule-of-law-destroying legislation, several other states, including Maryland, followed suit. The legal deck was stacked against the demonized tobacco companies, and it was stacked by lawyers, who dominate all state legislatures, and who are supposed to be supportive of the rule of law. So much for that myth. When offered the choice of plundering a private corporation for political gain and defending the rule of law, plunder will always be chosen by the American political class.

Trial lawyers benefited handsomely from the $235 billion, gun-under-the-table "settlement" with the American tobacco companies. In Maryland, Peter Angelos was promised one fourth of the state’s $4 billion settlement for very minimal legal work, but eventually settled for a mere $150 million. Trial lawyers in dozens of other states pocketed tens of millions of dollars for very little legal work; such work was not necessary once legislation was put in place that would turn tobacco lawsuits into kangaroo courts or show trials.

So the political die has been cast. In principle, any manufacturer of any product can now be fair game for the trial lawyer/state legislator corporate extortion cabal. Indeed, almost as soon as the tobacco "settlement" was completed the news media began reporting on a new governmental "war on fat," with "Big Food" portrayed as the new villain. The statist intellectual class began writing articles and books demonizing the fast food industry (i.e., "Fast Food Nation" by Eric Schlosser), just as it had earlier demonized the tobacco industry. There is even a movie entitled "Supersize Me," about a man who (surprise!) gets fat after eating three meals a day of the most fattening menu items at McDonald’s for a month, while giving up exercise at the same time. A "fat summit" has been held by "public health activists" and their trial lawyer friends in Washington, D.C.

Trial lawyers have filed lawsuits against McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Burger King, and other fast food chains. They have represented "victims" like one Gregory Rhymes, a fifteen-year-old boy who was five feet six inches tall and tipped the scales at more than 400 pounds. Rhymes said he ate at McDonald’s several times a day (Big Macs, fries and chocolate shakes are his preferred choices), normally "supersizing" his meals. His lawyer, Samuel Hirsch, said that Rhymes and his other clients "are too dumb to know what’s good for them."

A Washington state man has even sued the dairy industry and the Safeway grocery chain, claiming that his lifelong habit of drinking fresh milk was responsible for his clogged arteries.

To increase the likelihood that the "war on fat" will succeed, the federal government introduced a new measure of "obesity" in recent years that will allow it to exaggerate the actual number of obese people in the U.S. The "body mass index" is a measure of one’s weight that does not distinguish between fat and muscle. Consequently, many physically fit Americans – including quite a few professional athletes – are "officially" obese according to the U.S. government. This index was the work of the rotund former U.S. Surgeon General and Hillary Clinton protégé, C. Everett Koop.

Armed with this new information, and with the undeniable fact that obesity leads to health problems, many of the same "public health activists" who crusaded against tobacco (but are mostly silent about smoking now since they got their cash) are urging lawsuits against the fast food industry and calling for "fat taxes," with part of the revenue to be earmarked to "public health organizations" in which they are employed.

Many of the nonprofit sector public health organizations have received some of the tobacco settlement largesse, courtesy of donations/investments by trial lawyers, and are using these funds to wage their "war on fat." As antismoking activist John Banzhaf of George Washington University Law School has (under)stated, "People are wondering if tactics used against the tobacco industry very successfully . . . could be used against the problem of obesity." Professor Marion Nestle of New York University concurred, saying "It might be time to follow the lead of the legal tactics that smoked out Big Tobacco."

WorldNetDaily writer Joel Miller predicts how the War on Fat will proceed:

Ten years from now, spokesmen from Nabisco, Frito-Lay, McDonald’s and Hershey are all going to be testifying in congressional hearings, ‘No, we did not know that fat was addictive. No, we did not deliberately manipulate fat levels to hoop unwary consumers of our products.’ And then 10 years later, Congress and the ‘fat industry’ will reach an ‘Historic Fat Accord,’ like the one reached with tobacco.

This may sound far-fetched, but then so did the notion that smokers do not recognize the health risks of smoking just a few years ago. Or that someone would sue McDonald’s for becoming fat.

The "War on Fat" is part and parcel of the ongoing war on capitalism that will continue to cripple the American economy and destroy our freedom if it continues. As Ludwig von Mises wrote in Human Action (Scholar’s Edition, pp. 728–729):

[O]nce the principle is admitted that it is the duty of government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments. A good case could be made out in favor of prohibition of alcohol and nicotine. And why limit the government’s benevolent providence to the protection of the individual’s body only? Is not the harm a man may inflict on his mind and soul even more disastrous than any bodily evils? Why not prevent him from reading bad books and seeing bad plays, from looking at bad paintings and statues and from hearing bad music? The mischief done by bad ideologies, surely, is much more pernicious, both for the individual and for the whole society, than that done by narcotic drugs.

Mises further pointed out that these are not merely "imaginary specters," for "no paternal government . . . ever shrank from regimenting its subjects’ minds, beliefs, and opinions." This of course has been the main task of the government school monopoly in America for more than a century.

And, "If one abolishes man’s freedom to determine his own consumption, one takes all freedoms away." Our neo-prohibitionists may seem like mere nannies, busybodies and petty tyrants, but with the help of governments and subsidized by wealthy trial lawyers they "unwittingly support the case of censorship, inquisition, religious intolerance, and the persecution of dissenters."

[nunechka]

anony can you please put a summary at the end of your rants?
where can i get the cliff notes for anony?

#1. supersize me showed us that eating fast food everyday was bad... however, i had to do research for my 400 level biz ops class and the fact of the matter is that mcdonalds WAS a pretty good company, but due to cutting costs, downsizing/resizing etc... they now reuse the grease of the animal for frying the potatoes (which they didnt before), the meat is cut and purchased in a manner that is rather unsantitary and on and on... the problem is that there are people like anony that think its politcs... LOL! what does politics have anything to do with the correct way of butchering the animal versus the incorrect way, and trust me this has nothing to do with religion... research shows that if you scare the animal before cutting it, the brain releases chemicals that are harmful to the human being, even after cooking... it also shows that if animals are mistreated through life, the meat will be filled with not only the hormones i said of before, but natural hormones that drive animals crazy, for example we know that people go thru depression right? well it is prooven that chemicals released in the brain that essentially predict or show that a person has gone crazy, shows up in other animals when they are mistreated, abused, etc...

SOOOO! anonymouse with your politcal blabber and all this nonesense, you can rest assure that we do loose as a society when we dont take care of our society, and that goes to everything plants, animals, and us...

on to greater and "bigger" things... those 2 fat girls who sued mcdonalds do have a point, however just as any NORMAL human being, when you notice that something is causing you harm (lets say hitting your head on the wall) do you stop? or do you sue the wall??? the wall is made of concrete, it is hard and yes any living thing can be destroyed if it runs into it, etc... so i thats why i dont eat mcdonalds everyday and so i hit my head on the wall only once evrey 3 or 4 months... but i am sure that if i eat mcdonalrds and foods similary prepared everyday, that the results (as proven my the movie) can be life threatening and devastating...

eat at home, prepare your own food and eat healthy

[Anonymouse]

anony can you please put a summary at the end of your rants?
where can i get the cliff notes for anony?

#1. supersize me showed us that eating fast food everyday was bad... however, i had to do research for my 400 level biz ops class and the fact of the matter is that mcdonalds WAS a pretty good company, but due to cutting costs, downsizing/resizing etc... they now reuse the grease of the animal for frying the potatoes (which they didnt before), the meat is cut and purchased in a manner that is rather unsantitary and on and on... the problem is that there are people like anony that think its politcs... LOL! what does politics have anything to do with the correct way of butchering the animal versus the incorrect way, and trust me this has nothing to do with religion... research shows that if you scare the animal before cutting it, the brain releases chemicals that are harmful to the human being, even after cooking... it also shows that if animals are mistreated through life, the meat will be filled with not only the hormones i said of before, but natural hormones that drive animals crazy, for example we know that people go thru depression right? well it is prooven that chemicals released in the brain that essentially predict or show that a person has gone crazy, shows up in other animals when they are mistreated, abused, etc...

SOOOO! anonymouse with your politcal blabber and all this nonesense, you can rest assure that we do loose as a society when we dont take care of our society, and that goes to everything plants, animals, and us...

on to greater and "bigger" things... those 2 fat girls who sued mcdonalds do have a point, however just as any NORMAL human being, when you notice that something is causing you harm (lets say hitting your head on the wall) do you stop? or do you sue the wall??? the wall is made of concrete, it is hard and yes any living thing can be destroyed if it runs into it, etc... so i thats why i dont eat mcdonalds everyday and so i hit my head on the wall only once evrey 3 or 4 months... but i am sure that if i eat mcdonalrds and foods similary prepared everyday, that the results (as proven my the movie) can be life threatening and devastating...

eat at home, prepare your own food and eat healthy

Did you bother to read the article I posted? Or are you going to constantly babble about this. What is your point? Can you tell me?

Can you get it through your leftist socialistic egalitarian environmentalist greasy cranium that people actually prefer eating at these places? Why else do people go? Do you believe they are stupid and not making choices? Why do we need "public health warnings" and government action on corporations such as McDonald's or the Tobacco companies? If you read the article you would see that human action is based on purposeful behavior. You food nazis however constantly whine about everything.