dunroamin'
For quite a few days now the sign seen in West Texas in front of the stinking, fetid CAFO – Real Food for Real People – has been cooking in my mind. Or, given the demise of air quality downwind from the waste lagoon of the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, where hot Trans-Pecos Chihuahuan manurebreezes welcome the uninitiated like strike bolts at the abattoir, not so much cooking as rotting. Cooking or rotting, it’s pretty clear “our unweeden garden” is full of “things rank and gross in nature”. Real food for real people. Real.
Why is it that when people reasonably ask about how our industrialized corn to cow to cholesterol daisy chain works, the ConAgra response is defensive: “Real Food” they assert, as if a tomato or green beans are not; and “for Real People” as if those who want to know how carcasses are dealt with and strike bolts used, are not, simply because they want to know, “real people”. This raises tandem questions about Real Men, of course, and real manhood. And, sooner or later, to Kraft, and what’s in Real Cheese. Because it is very likely the sonuvabitch at Cargill or Tysons or some other meat Communist (let’s socialize access to steak) had himself a grilled Real Cheese sandwich for lunch made with Velveeta, and for a snack some CheeseWiz and for dinner some Macaroni and Cheese, all made in a lab about as green as West Texas.
This is not distantly related to the Tennessee coal fly ash slurry spill that occurred a year ago more or less, effluenting into the watershed some 1.1 billion gallons of waste. Or to the emptiness of homes in beefouled Maricopa, Arizona, which now lay as wasted mortgagors shelled next to the cowstink, or to Bank of America’s cleverly marketed trillion dollar commitment to the same low income neighborhoods they so elegantly fk’d over the last ten years. Denmark is rotting.
Well, not literally. When Ronald Reagan turned off the energy efficient lights before closing the barn door, all the Carter era investments in turbine wind technology were scooped up for 15 cents on the dollars by who? You guessed it: Elsinore.
So while Marcellus and Horatio are warm in their homes along the north sea, we’re here processing corn into Wiz, giving Iowa a subsidy for it, and calling it cheese; we’re turning otherwise fertile manure into steroid-toxins and calling it real, and not at all paying attention to authenticity, and certainly not to Michigan, which has just about fallen over the ledge. Have you seen anywhere in Michigan but the Law Library in Ann Arbor or the blueberries on Mackinac? It’s a West Texas slaughterhouse and Kingston, Tennesse coal fly ash slurry all in one.
Here in Arizona meanwhile this Christmas, there’s the Chandler Wal Mart and the Tempe Home Depot, discounting both the big steak and the big rake. And we wonder how come everywhere we look something needs to be fixed and it’s not lunch.
The goal is not to get back to where we were before the great sort-of collapse of 2008. It’s to get to where we could be without the free lunch America genuinely thinks it has coming.
Real Men are going to run you out of Real America. If they can catch you.