Art Machine
Just another former infatuation junkie

The ever-vigilant Thud points us toward Alton Brown’s blog where his December 26th entry suggested that the blame for the recent mad cow scare lay not with the industry or with the government failing to enforce regulations, but with the average consumer’s desire for inexpensive food.

(As Thud also points out, Alton has yet to discover the joys of a PermaLink option. Bad Alton. No cookie.)

That’s right…you and I are to blame for the fact that hundreds if not thousands of animals will have to be destroyed because of the threat of BSE. We are to blame because our culture has come to value two qualities above all else: “cheap”, and “more”. How else can you explain the cancerous creep of Wal-Marts across our landscape, or the ever swelling American waistline?

You think wanting “more” for “less” is just good sense? Well let me tell you what you get: more of less. By demanding the cheapest beef (and food in general) we announce to all that we don’t place much value on our bodies, or the bodies of our children. We don’t value the pleasure of flavor, and we don’t value life. If we placed a little value on the life of the animal who’s dying for our dinner, maybe we wouldn’t demand that it be cheapest, and in many cases lowest quality, meat on Earth. Maybe, just maybe if we ate beef once or even twice a week rather than making daily pilgrimages through the fast food, drive thru, biggie-size feed lot, we’d be able to afford quality meet [sic] from an animal that was raised on honest to goodness grass.

Alton has since posted another entry following a landslide of angry e-mail from consumers who figured that Alton was demanding that we pay fifteen bucks a pop for steaks. That entry would be the December 31 entry (you see the pain you cause when you deny us a PermaLink, Alton? Go and think about what you’ve done).

Guess what Santa brought me for Christmas…an email box chock full of angry email! Just what I wanted. Seems my last rant led many to believe that I am a modern day Marie Antoinette shouting “let them eat steak”. I know that many families are on tight budgets these days. I know that not everyone can afford to lay out $15. for a raw steak once a month much less once a week, and I’m not suggesting that they should. What I am saying is that if in order to make beef cheap enough for people to afford as often as they like we have to feed them other cows, then maybe we should reconsider our beef habbit [sic].

Alton makes a bit of sense. After all, he seems in large part to be lashing out at the mass-produced consumer society built by the fast food companies that have consistenty sold us on garbage while convincing us that it’s “fast, cheap, and good (read: healthy).” And that’s a point that I happen to agree with.

Where I disagree with Alton is that it’s our drive for inexpensive food that leads cattle ranchers to ignore federal regulations and give their cows cannibalistic feed.

(For those of you that just got lost on that last paragraph – Mad Cow Disease is transmitted when one cow eats the brain of an infected cow, which simply doesn’t happen in nature.)

Alton seems to neglect the fact that we’re dealing with a corporate food industry, here. And modern-day corporate America is not based on what’s good for the consumer, it’s not based on what’s morally or ethically right, and it’s most certainly not based on what the consumer wants.

It’s based on how much money can be made.

Take a look at your grocery store the next time you walk past the snack foods, and really look at that product called “Lunchables.”

It’s trash.

It’s high salt, high carbohydrate, low protein, packed with sugars, in some cases high fat, and just in general so lacking in nutrients that it could never be considered a balanced meal. Kraft Foods can’t even be troubled to include real chocolate in its occasional desert slots, opting instead for “chocolate-flavored food substance” (and I wish to God I were making that up). Your child would be better cared for if you gave him the Lunchables cardboard box sans contents and told him to enjoy. But the product is marketed to parents as a complete, balanced meal. On the go and no time to waste to fix precious Junior’s lunchbox? Just slip him a box of Lunchables and he’s all set! It’s got meat and bread and cheese – and fruit juice! What could be more healthy?

Note: Lunchables are not a full, balanced meal. Meat by-products may be substituted for actual meat. Cheese contains Dow Chemicals Dietary Plastic^TM. Crackers contain no wheat. Fruit juice may not actually contain fruit.

But now that you’ve taken a close look at the Lunchable, would you want the Lunchable?

Of course not! You’d sound a lot more like, well, Alton:

That said, if I was working three jobs and just needed to quickly get some food in my kid’s stomach I guess I’d line up at…no. Damnit no I wouldn’t. I’d take my kid to the grocery store and eat out of the aisles before I’d feed her crap.

The Lunchable does not fulfill the consumer desire for a quick, simple meal for children because it is not a meal. It has, however, been sold to that desire.

It’s not about what you want. If it were, Lunchables would contain real meat, actual bread, good cheese, fresh vegetables, and a healthy drink like real fruit juice. Or water. It would be what it claims to be.

Instead, it’s about the money. Lunchables get sold for somewhere between one buck and three – sometimes going as high as five, but rarely.

With the garbage put in them, they probably cost about a quarter to make. Which makes a five dollar Lunchable – if we’re being generous enough to put its production around $1.50 – worth $3.50 profit. Over twice its original expense.

If we didn’t clamor for cheap beef, the companies producing it would still seek ways to make it less expensive to produce – even if they could mark the product up to fifteen bucks a steak. That’s the prevailing corporate morality in the United States, today – find a way to do it cheaper and faster, and don’t worry about safer or better. Don’t even worry about legal.

So, on the one hand – Alton is wrong. This isn’t a result of consumer greed forcing the poor corporations to do something they don’t want to do. This is a result of the corporations trying their best to keep the American consuming public in the dark while feeding them crap.

On the other hand – Alton is right. We deserve better, and we should love ourselves more than that. We should demand clean food that tastes good, and we should be willing to eat a little bit more of the expenses for it. Just because it’s cheaper to eat all of your meals at McHeartAttacks (newsflash: it actually is) doesn’t mean that we should chuck our cooking utensils and head for the car. We should stand up and support food that we know to have been kept to higher standards, while we voice our discontent with the status quo. We should tell the Bush administration that we don’t appreciate their relaxing bans on selling downed cows even as the government refuses to buy them, itself. (What? Did we all miss that part of the story?) We should be aware when ingredients banned to protect us from Mad Cow Disease are found in livestock feed shipped to Texas (back in 2001, at that). For that matter, why were we never told that regulations concerning cattle feed are hardly ever enforced?

Here’s a fun fact. I haven’t written a lot on Mad Cow Disease, lately. Not because the issue is beneath my concern, but because I do all of my ranting aloud to anybody who will listen. By the time I sit down at my keyboard, I’m usually to exhausted to actually type.

The Health Department says that we shouldn’t be worried. In part because BSE symptoms can take up to 15 years to appear in infected humans.

Big comfort.

Of course, all of this double-talk and rug-sweeping is giving me convulsions now, so what’s the point?

Every budding director has one of those films. You know, the ones with spotty sound, fuzzy film quality, focus issues, and the like. Since this Christmas saw Sisyphus Films actually getting a video camera with which to shoot original footage, I figured it was time for mine. The fact that it closely resembles a home movie of cute kittycats is purely coincidental.

Thrill! to the adventures of spoiled housecat Mildred as she begs for food and is escorted from the living room. Laugh! at the madcap antics of Cernunos, the incredibly long cat from Arlington. And Awww… at his shy sister Sekhmet. All with a score from Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong.

Warning: this documentary is of the “special interest” variety – meaning that it might not appeal to people who don’t appreciate watching a cat eat Turkey.

One good thing about mad cow disease being found in America.

At least it knocked Michael Jackson out of the Headline News crawl.

Friend, the RIAA wants to know – have you talked to your children about file sharing?

And, for that matter, what are you buying your kids for Christmas? According to whatacrappypresent.com, buying CD’s for kids in their teens and younger might not be such a good idea. My personal favorite reason?

If you knew someone who’d just been sued by one of the big record companies, you wouldn’t want to buy any of their products either. Families like yours are literally getting pushed into bankruptcy. Why not buy music from record labels that don’t sue their fans? Check out riaaradar.com.

Not just priceless: puh-riceless

Link via Thudfactor.

Theatre lovers, playwrights, and general history buffs may enjoy this. What follows is a passage from a book entitled Write That Play! and is taken from Chapter 1: “The Eagle Screams or Drama Over America.” Try to guess the period by the end of the passage.

One out of every seven adult members of the population of the United States bought an automobile last year, one out of every ten a radio, and one out of thirty-six an electric refrigerator. Approximately one out of every seventy-five adults in the United States wrote a play last year. That means, in a round number, one million plays. Playwriting in this country is now in the field of big-production statistics. We are entering upon an era of unprecedentedly widespread activity in drama.

A recent survey among drama agents and producers in New York established forty-thousand as a conservative estimate of the number of play manuscripts submitted in a year. Out of ten years of teaching playwriting at the University of Michigan and varied associations with the playwriting activity of the state and country at large, I am sure it is safe to estimate at least twenty-five plays written for every one that reaches New York, or one million plays a year.

It was further learned from the survey that except for a concentration from New York and Hollywood the flood of manuscripts reaching the drama agents’ desks come salmost uniformly from every part of the country, and from every class of people. Three plays I saw on one agent’s desk, his morning mail, were from a rancher in Montana, a major in South Carolina, and a young woman, a university student in Illinois. It is evident that playwriting is becoming one of the great national passions and bonds of fellowship, like bridge, golf, and dancing the big apple.

It’s very interesting to look back and see the state of the theatre in the past of our country.

Write That Play! was published in 1939.

The Bangkok Post does its usual bang-up job and casts doubt on Santa Claus’ gender by revealing new research in the gender of his (her?) reindeer.

Female reindeer retain their antlers till after they give birth in the spring. Therefore every single one of them, from Rudolph to Blitzen, has to be a girl. Now you know.

It’s been a big news day for America. First of all, Jacko finally had charges filed against him. Then Malvo was found guilty. Then the Green River killer confessed, agreed to answer questions regarding his crimes, and got a life sentence in exchange (instead of the death penalty, otherwise). And the federal courts announced that they would not be bypassed by the U.S. government – alleged terrorists cannot be detained indefinitely without charges filed, regardless of the Patriot Act.

Of course, the story that I actually had to dig to find? Ariel Sharon goin’ Bush on the PLO’s collective ass.

The Israeli prime minister is giving him only a few months – Mr Sharon avoided a more specific deadline – to end Palestinian violence and begin implementing the peace plan known as the roadmap.

If he fails to do this, Mr Sharon will start implementing what he calls a “severance policy” – in other words, Israel will act unilaterally to separate itself from the Palestinians.

And, in a “Wika-wika-what?” moment, Bush tells them not to do anything foolish.

The Bush administration, responding coolly to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s announcement of a possible “disengagement plan” in the West Bank, warned Israel on Thursday against taking unilateral steps that effectively abandoned the American-sponsored peace plan, called the road map, which would establish a Palestinian state.

“We would oppose any unilateral steps that block the road toward negotiations under the road map that lead to the two-state vision,” said Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman.

Considering that Bush himself pioneered the policy of pre-emptive strikes without the approval of the international community, it’s yet another case of the pot calling the kettle cookware.

Insanity. It’s hard to be a role model against a practice that you’ve set the precedent for.

But what do I know? Mick Jagger’s just been knighted.

To be perfectly honest, I despise The Drudge Report.

While I’m being perfectly honest, I also despise The O’Reilly Factor.

Which makes this situation even more sweet.

Responding to an exclusive yearender DRUDGE dispatch, which presented NIELSEN’s Top 20 BOOKSCAN list of 2003 sales, O’Reilly called the DRUDGE REPORT a “threat to democracy.”

“I mean you can’t believe a word Matt Drudge says,” O’Reilly told the cameras. “Now you’ve got the Matt Drudges of the world and these other people, Michael Moore and all of these crazies, all right, no responsibility… that is a threat to democracy, I think.” O’Reilly warned: “They’ll just spin it and twist it and take it out of proportion every which way.”

Horror of horrors – for Matt Drudge to find himself lumped into the same category with Michael Moore. Note how when Drudge was breaking news about stained dresses in Monica Lewinsky’s closet, he was just a cutting-edge reporter daring to tell the stories others wouldn’t break (mostly because there was absolutely zero confirmation at the time) – but now that he’s reporting on right wing nuts, he’s “a threat to democracy.”

My prediction? In less than two months, this will be standard in all new first-person shooter games.