Tuesday roundup

F* it: you don't undertake military humanitarian intervention lightly, but it really does look like the time has come for use of force in Syria. Oh, there's also a massive food security crisis, among other things, in Central African Republic.

Of course addiction mangles families. And the tragic case in the article started, unsurprisingly, with a prescription painkiller.

Two new books about the real cost of cheap meat:

In other words, we’re all subsidizing a churning rotation of bankruptcies that keeps companies like Tyson supplied with the newest infrastructure and a desperate labor force.

and

American meat eaters live, for the most part, in happy ignorance of the system that grows animals for slaughter. When that ignorance is interrupted with a bit of information about the meat industry, we typically respond with outrage.

and

At the same time, because urban meat eaters live far from the farms, we see nothing in a piece of meat but the price, and we reward those businesses who can provide it most cheaply. This has led to true outrages: environmental degradation, Tyson-style exploitation, and the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. These, Ogle points out, are the tradeoffs we’ve chosen as eaters who overwhelmingly opt for the cheapest meat.
In other words, when our ignorance is interrupted by outrage, sometimes it’s justified, sometimes it’s not — but either way, it’s our own damn fault.

Manure spills, dead hogs, and bacteria-tainted meat highlighted Americans’ contradictory relationships with their food and their values: They wanted cheap, low-fat meat, and they wanted it from a drive-up window, but satisfying those desires carried costs in the form of environmental damage and real threats to health.

Ogle has a point here: We shouldn’t complain about the hidden costs of industrial meat if we’re not prepared to cover those costs at the butcher counter.

As for cheap wine, how can one tell? What are the indicators besides price?

If you take nothing else away from anything I've ever posted, heed these words from Carolyn: "the inability to say no leaves you vulnerable to controlling people."

Alexandra Petri makes some reasonable points about Woody Allen but girlfriend really needs to learn to self-edit.

I disagree with Gary Taubes on many things, but his piece on why nutrition is confusing, is spot-on.

Allow extra time for any kind of transaction when you share a name with someone on a watchlist.

I know some people say "strong is the new skinny" is just another shade of patriarchy, and that's largely true, but strong has its own advantages, and also tells the patriarchy to f* off:

There is something profoundly upsetting about a proud, confident, unrepentantly muscular woman. She risks being seen by her viewers as dangerous, alluring, odd, beautiful or, at worst, a sort of raree show. She is, in fact, a smorgasbord of mixed messages. This inability to come to grips with a strong, heavily muscled woman accounts for much of the confusion and downright hostility that often greets her.” ~ David L. Chapman