Something like meat but not meat

Did you feel that? That visceral, whole-body shudder? That weird, painful spasm in the national colon?

Something rather dire has transpired, is why. Something creepy and banal, fatty and soaked in synthetic hormones, blasted with bleach, injected with filler, ground up with various leftover animal bits, grease, feces, oil fumes, a few million fingernails, lost and desiccated dreams. And I’m not talking about GOP pitbull Eric Cantor losing to a nutball tea party nobody who loves Ayn Rand and really hates immigrants.

It’s just capitalism at work. Again. It’s just one heavily toxic megacorp buying up another toxic megacorp and all of it making a perverse sort of sense, given how Tyson Foods is one of the largest (and scariest) industrial meat purveyors in the land, and its new, $8 billion acquisition, Hillshire Brands, makes some of the weirdest and most fat- and preservative-encrusted “handheld” (it’s a category) meat-like products in the universe (Jimmy Dean, Sara Lee, Ballpark Franks, et al) – the kinds of products that, shortly after you eat them, cause your vision to wobble, your heart to seize and random extremities to lose sensation for a few hours. You know, just for fun.

We’re used to it by now, are we not? Giant, blandly evil companies that have your best interests nowhere in sight coming together to make you even more sick and addicted to chemically blasted, malformed food products for the sake of massive profit, and to hell with your regulation and your concerns about animal treatment, national health, obesity rates, spiritual well being, the very definition of “meat”?

Of course we are. Thanks to “ag-gag” laws, the fawning adoration of a majority of the Supreme Court, the FDA/USDA’s lax rules on what constitutes safe and edible (not to mention “all-natural,” “organic,” and “food”) and the efforts of their own armies of lobbyists to crush any new oversight, these companies now have so much power to produce whatever they want, however they want, they merely chortle in your face – and the face of your sick, fat kids – as they flick away meager million-dollar fines, toxicity studies and even shocking new books that detail their vile practices.

Read More: http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2014/06/10/something-like-meat-but-not-meat/