The black market for haggis

If you celebrated Burns night last night, in honor of the Scottish poet who was born on January 25 1759, you may have eaten haggis.  And if it was the real thing, and you live in the U.S., then you were on the receiving end of smuggled goods.

The NY Times has the story:

Building the Perfect Meal With Sheep Lungs and a Suitcase
A federal agency bans the sale of sheep lungs, a key ingredient for Haggis. Lovers of the distinctive Scottish dish have found ways around that.

"On Saturday, Scots across the world will dine on haggis to celebrate the birthday of Robert Burns, the 18th-century Scottish poet. But for haggis purists in the United States, celebrating Burns Night can be a challenge. Since the 1970s, the Department of Agriculture’s food-safety division has banned the sale of sheep lungs, which give traditional haggis its distinctive crumbly texture.

"Many of the millions of Americans with Scottish ancestry have happily settled for an increasingly wide array of lung-less haggis (or, repulsed by the thought of eating sheep innards, avoided the dish entirely). For decades, however, a small but impassioned contingent has resorted to illicit methods to bring authentic haggis onto American soil, motivated by a commitment to tradition and a fondness for the taste and texture of boiled lung.

“If people want something, they’re going to get it,” said Patrick Angus Carr, the chairman of the New York branch of the Saint Andrew’s Society, a Scottish heritage group. “How much cocaine and fentanyl is smuggled into the country every day?”

Is repugnance to foie gras contagious?

The Guardian has the story from the UK, focusing on a particular restaurant, and its proprietor, who has withstood protests:

Pressure grows on British chefs after New York bans foie gras
Restaurateurs and MPs are turning against the delicacy after years of intense animal rights protests

"New York’s authorities have decided to ban shops and restaurants from selling it and campaigners want London – indeed, the whole of Britain – to follow suit.

“Banning it is a fad,” he says. “New York is just following a fad, going with the flow. If it is ethically raised, then I don’t see a problem. If they are [forcibly] fed on an industrial scale, I think that’s wrong. But the foie gras we serve comes from a family who look after their geese.”

"His stance is not one that most animal welfare campaigners agree with. Making foie gras generally relies on force-feeding ducks or geese for about two weeks, causing their livers to expand dramatically. Some farmers claim force-feeding – known as gavage – is unnecessary, but in France, where 98% of the foie gras eaten in Britain is made, a pâté can only be called foie gras if gavage is used."
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Recent related post:

Friday, November 1, 2019

No more foie gras in New York City

No more foie gras in New York City

The NY Times has the story:

Foie Gras, Served in 1,000 Restaurants in New York City, Is Banned
Animal cruelty concerns led the City Council to approve the ban, which takes effect in 2022. One chef’s reaction: “What’s next? No more veal?”

"The New York City Council overwhelmingly passed legislation on Wednesday that will ban the sale of foie gras in the city, one of the country’s largest markets, beginning in 2022.

New York City will join California in prohibiting the sale of foie gras, the fattened liver of a duck or goose, over animal cruelty concerns."

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Previous posts on foie gras here.

HT: Alex Chan

New York City considers bill to ban foie gras

Bill aims to ban sale of foie gras in New York restaurants over 'cruel' process
If bill passes, anyone violating the law could be liable to a $1,000 fine, up to a year in jail or both

"New York City council is considering outlawing the product – which derives from duck or goose and translates as “fatty liver” – which is a staple at many of its top restaurants.

"Critics of foie gras say the process is cruel because ducks and geese are overfed through a pipe which can expand the liver up to 10 times its normal size.

The proposed bill, which could be voted on in months, would ban the sale of foie gras made from birds that have " force fed and establishments from serving it.
...
"If New York introduces a ban it will put the city alongside California, which has a state-wide ban on the production and sale of foie gras. Chicago passed a ban in 2006, but it was overturned two years later.

"Whole Foods banned its sale in 1997 and Postmates ended deliveries of it last year.

"Outside the US, Britain, Israel and India all have bans on sale or production."
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For a different view, French law (Code rural) states
"Article L654-27-1
Créé par Loi n°2006-11 du 5 janvier 2006 - art. 74 JORF 6 janvier 2006
Le foie gras fait partie du patrimoine culturel et gastronomique protégé en France. On entend par foie gras, le foie d'un canard ou d'une oie spécialement engraissé par gavage."

Google translate: "Foie gras is part of the cultural and gastronomic heritage protected in France. By foie gras, the liver of a duck or a goose specially fattened by gavage."

Kidney donor athlete: Steve

Kidney donors have to be in excellent health, and the site Kidney Donor Athletes celebrates some exceptional donors, particularly as they return to their physically active lives after donating a kidney.

The recent entry Meet Kidney Donor Athlete, Steve!,  is inspiring on multiple levels. It is the story of the donor (and the people he met along the way) who started the chain at Virginia Mason hospital in Seattle, that I blogged about after hearing from the transplant nephologist Dr. Cyrus Cryst:

Monday, March 25, 2019

Followup on the latest Freakonomics kidney exchange chain

Here's how he describes his wife's reaction to his decision to become a non-directed donor:
"My wife said to me “This is the weirdest midlife crisis I have ever heard of.”  I told her, “You know, some guys buy Corvettes and have affairs.”  That quieted her down.  For a minute."

And here's a thought on where chains can go:
"I was elated to learn that the other donation would be to a Native Alaskan woman from Utqiagvik, Alaska, which is the northernmost town in the U.S.  Just think of how terrifying it must be to live in an Arctic village with a serious health problem.  Her odds of receiving a kidney were very small.  There is no way she could have gotten herself to Seattle in time to receive a deceased person’s kidney.  She does not live right around the corner.  And, having spent much of my working career sailing all over the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean, I have a deep emotional connection to Alaska.  It just felt right."
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In separate correspondence, I learned that one of the hardships for Debbie, from Utqiagvik in Alaska, was that for some time after her transplant "it meant I couldn't eat raw whale muktak (outer skin and blubber of the whale ) which i love..."

“If we can make the meat without the animal, why wouldn’t we do that?” A future for lab-grown meat

The New Republic looks towards a cruelty free (and maybe animal free) food supply of meat (from an interview with Tyson Foods’ Tom Hayes, who recently resigned as CEO).

The Meat Mogul’s Case For Lab-Grown Beef
 By AMANDA LITTLE

"it was Hayes who made the timeliest and most convincing case for meat alternatives—and cellular meats in particular. 

"He emphasized that the entire “cell-to-fork” process for growing and harvesting lab meats is two to six weeks—a blink of an eye compared with the two and a half years it typically takes to grow cattle from conception to maturity. That represents huge cost and energy savings. Hayes also pointed out that cultured meats eliminate concerns about E. coli and other pathogens that can contaminate animal meat during processing. The single biggest risk in his business, he said, is contamination. A few months after Cargill invested in cell-based meat producer Memphis Meats, it recalled 130,000 pounds of ground beef that had been contaminated with E. coli—a problem that wouldn’t happen with lab-grown meat."

Foie gras off the menu (again) in California

The SF Chronicle had the story (and I missed it until now...)

California’s foie gras ban upheld, though chefs vow to fight on
Jonathan Kauffman, Jan. 7, 2019

"After six years of legal battles, California’s ban on foie gras is still in effect.

"The U.S. Supreme Court announced Monday it would not hear a challenge to California’s 2004 ban on the production and sale of foie gras, leaving in place a 2017 ruling upholding it.
...

"The California law, which went into effect in 2004 but delayed enforcement of the ban until 2012, forced California’s only foie gras producer to close. Some California restaurants continued to serve foie gras, however, claiming they were giving it away to guests. Starting in 2012, groups such as the Coalition for Humane and Ethical Farming Standards, backed by the French Laundry’s Thomas Keller and dozens of other chefs, have supported a series of efforts to overturn the ban, leading to a legal back-and-forth.

"In 2015, U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson ruled that the ban violated the federal Poultry Products Inspections Act,which prohibits states from imposing their own conditions on the sale of poultry. The ruling put foie gras back on Bay Area menus.

"The California state attorney general appealed the ruling, however, and two years later, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reversed it. However, the court put a stay on the ban so the plaintiffs — two out-of-state foie gras producers and a Los Angeles area restaurant group — could petition the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the case.

That challenge is now effectively dead."

Kosher and halal slaughtering banned in Belgium

The coalition of liberal animal rights activists and European anti-Semites and Islamophobes doesn't make the new laws easy to parse:

Belgium Bans Religious Slaughtering Practices, Drawing Praise and Protest

"BRUSSELS — A Belgian ban on the Muslim and Jewish ways of ritually slaughtering animals went into effect on New Year’s Day, part of a clash across Europe over the balance between animal welfare and religious freedom.

"With both animal rights advocates and right-wing nationalists pushing to ban ritual slaughter, religious minorities in Belgium and other countries fear that they are the targets of bigotry under the guise of animal protection.
...
"Laws across Europe and European Union regulations require that animals be rendered insensible to pain before slaughter, to make the process more humane. For larger animals, stunning before slaughter usually means using a “captive bolt” device that fires a metal rod into the brain; for poultry it usually means an electric shock.
...
"But slaughter by Muslim halal and Jewish kosher rules requires that an animal be in perfect health — which religious authorities say rules out stunning it first — and be killed with a single cut to the neck that severs critical blood vessels. The animal loses consciousness in seconds, and advocates say it may cause less suffering than other methods, not more.

"Most countries and the European Union allow religious exceptions to the stunning requirement, though in some places — like the Netherlands, where a new law took effect last year, and Germany — the exceptions are very narrow. Belgium is joining Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark and Slovenia among the nations that do not provide for any exceptions.
...
"The idea for the ban was first proposed by Ben Weyts, a right-wing Flemish nationalist and the minister in the Flanders government who is responsible for animal welfare. Mr. Weyts was heavily criticized in 2014 for attending the 90th birthday of Bob Maes, who had collaborated with the Nazi occupation of Belgium in World War II and later became a far-right politician."

Regulation of human and animal milk, in the U.S. and France

Here's an article full of interesting observations:

Mathilde Cohen, Regulating Milk: Women and Cows in France and the United States, 65 American Journal of Comparative Law, 469 (2017)


"Much like nineteenth-century milk reformers lobbied for a safe cow's milk supply in the cities, twenty-first-century public health officials are calling for the regulation of human milk.
...
"Milk is peculiar, however, in that, unlike other embodied forms of labor, it is also a food, cutting across species in two ways.15 Humans do not typically eat other humans' body parts or bodily fluids, yet human milk is their primal food.' 6 Humans do not typically turn to animals for sex cells, wombs, or sex, yet they commonly consume animal milk.
...
"The analogy between human and animal milk is sure to offend some. Much of human life and thinking, especially in Western cultures such as France and the United States, is concerned with distinguishing humans from other animals.
...
"I argue that some of the social and legal norms that have shaped the relationship
of the French and Americans to animal milk equally apply to human milk.
Why compare the United States to France? These are two of the biggest dairy consuming and producing countries in the world, 26which regulate animal milk production with little concern for animal welfare. Yet, the French and Americans entertain different cultural and regulatory approaches to human and animal milk, presenting us with a puzzling chiasm. The American sanitary regulation for animal milk is stricter than the French, resulting in a federal ban on raw milk.27 France, the birthplace of pasteurization, 28 is laxer, in part because raw milk is a necessary ingredient in its prized cheeses. With respect to human milk, the picture is reversed. The United States is the more permissive country, a land of no law, where American women can freely trade their milk. In France, human milk is so stringently governed that French women are prohibited from giving their milk to others, even for free, unless they turn to state-controlled milk banks."
...
p486. "In France, at the peak of the wet-nursing profession in the 1880s, close to 100,000 infants were placed in the care of wet nurses-about 10% of the children born in the country at the time."
...
p494. "Under French law the sale of human milk is illegal because milk is considered a bodily part similar to an organ.153 Article 16-1 of the French Civil Code states, "The human body, its elements and its products may not form the subject of a patrimonial right."54 Lactariums possess the exclusive right to process and distribute human milk.1 55 They are prohibited from paying donors for their milk 156-which, incidentally, has resulted in a state of near-constant shortage. Before the HIV/AIDS crisis, lactariums did compensate donors "for the time spent for the milk donation." 157 Since 1992, donors can no longer be indemnified. 158 The official explanation for this shift is that compensation would be contrary to the principle of gratuity of contracts pertaining to bodily parts."
...
p506. "The milk-sharing website, OnlyTheBreast.com, hosts wet-nursing classified ads. A recent example read:
'I am a Surrogate who is due to deliver any time in the next 2-3 weeks. I am an over producer and will not have a child to feed so I am looking for a local family who is in need and would like to provide their baby with liquid gold. I am looking to nurse a baby during work hours (M-F) and can provide pumped milk for over nights and weekends. Occasional weekend feeds can be .'
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See my other posts on breast milk.

Feeding America: Podcast on HBS case study of Canice Prendergast and Feeding America

Here's an audio interview of Canice Prendergast and Scott Kominers (who wrote the HBS case study) about the work that Prendergast and colleagues did with a team from Feeding America, which manages a network of more than 200 food banks nationwide.

The podcast is here: Building a Nonprofit Marketplace to Feed America

Prendergast says at one point: "The dynamic of the group was wonderful. I think one of the amazing things about this committee was essentially the length of time we got to listen to each other. I think if it has turned out to be a success, the reason was largely because of the willingness not of the academics to listen to the practitioners, but actually the practitioners to listen to the academics. This was a long way removed from anything that they imagined they would do when we started."


You can read the whole transcript by clicking on "Read More" at the bottom of the page linked above.

How storks became non-kosher

When I speak about repugnant transactions--transactions that some people would like to engage in but others think they shouldn't--I don't normally include dietary restrictions of a religious sort, like those which make food kosher or hallal (or vegetarian or vegan) since those restrictions are normally applied by people to themselves, not to others.  Thus most observant Jews don't think that non-Jews should keep kosher, and many vegetarians think that what you eat is a matter of personal preference.

However, within a religious community, what is allowed can be a matter of public discussion.  Haaretz has a (late breaking) account of the discussion of storks, in medieval Spain.  Perhaps storks aren't kosher because of a translation error?

How Rashi Got the Jews to Stop Eating Storks
A young rabbi in medieval Spain, scandalized by local laxness, sparks a bitter battle over bird on the plate
By Elon Gilad Jul 30, 2018

"During the second half of the 11th century, Rashi labored on his commentary of the Bible and the Babylonian Talmud, which became and still are highly influential. It was in these that Rashi identified the khasida with the stork, apparently for the first time.

Rashi could not read Arabic and was thus cut off from the traditions of the Geonim. He based his commentary of the oral tradition he received from his teachers, and his own power of logic.

With regard to the identity of the 20 unclean birds listed in the Bible, Rashi apparently did not receive a precise identification of each one. He writes in his commentary that the anafa, the bird coming right after the khasida in the list, was a heron - “I think.”

He may have been more certain regarding the khasida, since he doesn’t qualify that its identification was based on conjecture, but it probably was.
...
The influence of Rashi’s commentaries was immense. Once Rashi identified the khasida with the stork, this became the traditional view among European Jews with in just a few generations. Over time this tradition spread throughout the Jewish world, and into Christian vernacular translations of the Bible.

The identification of the khasida with the stork began to spread throughout Spanish Jewry as we have seen with the arrival of Asher ben Jehiel and his family at the turn of the 14th century, and Spanish Jews gradually stopped eating the bird.

When the Jews of Spain were expelled in 1492, they took the ban on stork to Jewish communities throughout the Arabic-speaking world, and these communities too stopped eating storks. Eventually all Jews accepted Rashi’s identification of the biblical khasida with the stork and today all Jews accept that storks are not kosher."

Laboratory grown meat: coming ...soon?

For omnivores concerned about cruelty in the food supply, laboratory grown meat offers an attractive possibility.  It's being explored in many places: here's an optimistic recent story that caught my eye on an Israeli Lab Meat Startup.

"Future Meat Technologies is developing a manufacturing platform for the production of meat products directly from animal cells. By the end of 2018, Future Meats intends to have a dish based on its cultured chicken meat served at a Jerusalem chef restaurant, the company’s chief scientist Yaakov Nahmias said in an interview with Calcalist Wednesday. The company is set to launch its first line of meat products by 2020, he said.

"Founded in February, Future Meat Technologies sprung from research conducted at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem by a team led by Mr. Nahmias. The technology is licensed to the company by the university's knowledge transfer company Yissum Research Development.


"Companies producing lab-cultured meat state that in addition to eliminating the need to raise animals for slaughter, lab-grown meat products reduce exposure to food-borne illnesses and reduce pollution and water consumption.


"The world’s first cultured beef hamburger was grown at a Maastricht University lab in 2013 by Mosa Meat, a Maastricht, the Netherlands-based company backed by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Other companies have since attempted to create meat from single cells.


"New York-based early-stage biotechnology startup Finless Foods Inc. is aiming to develop and mass manufacture lab-cultured alternatives to conventionally-caught and commercially-farmed seafood. San Francisco-based Memphis Meats produces beef, chicken, and duck products by culturing animal cells, and released the world’s first cultured meatball in February 2016 and the world’s first cultured poultry in March 2017.

...
"The first lab-grown burger, produced in 2013, cost about $2.3 million per kilogram. The price of cultured meat production has since plummeted. Production costs for Future Meats currently stand at $500 per kilo, and the company aims to reach a $5 per kilo cost by 2020, Mr. Nahmias said."

Cat meat in India

Here's a somewhat complicated story from Chennai, which focuses on cat meat being sold as mutton and other deceptions, and on pet cats being killed. But what caught my eye is that there is an ethnic group that enjoys eating cats:

In Chennai, a debate about cat meat after NGO’s crackdown on nomadic community
The Narikoravar are a marginalised group, traditionally known to kill feral cats for meat.

"The Narikoravar are a dwindling community. There are only around 200 families left in Chennai now, said Rajkumar, former president of Tamil Nadu’s Narikoravar community. They originally lived in forests and were hunters. Now, Rajkumar said, most of them make a living collecting paper and plastic from garbage cans and selling them to waste paper shops, earning less that Rs 100 a day. In 2016, the community was included in the list of Scheduled Tribes in Tamil Nadu.

The Narikoravar are traditionally known to kill feral cats and eat their meat. “Now they have moved to the city, so them killing domestic cats isn’t justified,” Pereira argued. “It is not categorised as food in India. Slaughter that happens anywhere outside a slaughter house is illegal. And more than anything, it’s an act of cruelty. Cats are trapped, kept in little cages and gunny bags.”
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HT: Mostly Economics blog, by Amol Agrawal.

Where man's best friend also tastes good: the market for dog meat in Korea

The winter Olympics in Korea is bringing out stories about the restaurants there that have dog meat on the menu, and about how foreigners might not be charmed:

The Daily Mail headlines it this way (with lots of pictures):
The trade in dog meat South Korea doesn't want Olympics tourists to see is exposed at market where they are slaughtered, chopped up and served in bubbling red broth for just $8 a bowl
Here are their sub-headlines

• "Dogs and even puppies are sold openly for food in Moran market, Seongnam, outside of Seoul, South Korea, Dailymail.com reveals - showing claims it would be closed last May are false 
• The dogs are kept in freezing, dark cages until they are slaughtered, their fur burned off and their carcasses are put on display
• Up to 80,000 dogs are sold and slaughtered at the market a each year to be made into an $8 soup, which folklore claims boosts eaters' sex drive 
• But ahead of the Olympic Winter Games coming to PyeongChang on Friday, officials issued guidelines for when it comes to eating dog meat, urging citizens not to consume the animals during the Olympics 
• Two-month-old puppies fare little better, being sold for just $9.20 or £6.50 out of metal crates and cardboard boxes, with some saying they can be eaten too "

USA Today puts it this way:
Winter Olympics shines spotlight on dog meat trade in South Korea

"Eating dog meat is common and legal in Korea, as well as many parts of Asia, and is mainly eaten by older people. Dotted around the country are thousands of restaurants serving “gaegogi” dishes that, according to folklore, have strengthening and medicinal properties."

Why Don’t Americans Eat Horse?

From Eater.com, a long interesting summary of
Why Don’t Americans Eat Horse?
The red meat is common in many cultures, but rarely makes it on menus in the U.S. by Tim Forster

"Killing horses isn’t technically banned in the U.S.; variations on an outright horse slaughter ban have surfaced but floundered in Congress several times since 2006. But appropriations committees did successfully ban funding to the USDA to inspect horse meat in 2007 — and if there’s no money for inspections, there’s no guarantee of safety, therefore it can’t be sold. In the words of a USDA spokesperson, “If there is no mark of inspection, then horse meat is not allowed to move in our national commerce.” This spelled the end for America’s three horse-slaughter facilities, closed a decade ago. (Their products had primarily been sent overseas.)"

He makes the cultural argument (cowboys tamed the West), but I'm not convinced...

Wild (and abandoned) horses are starving, because we love them too much

Chris Stewart, a horse-loving Republican congressman from Utah, writes in the NY Times:

The Hard Truth About the West’s Wild Horse Problem

"The federal government’s Wild Horse and Burro Program is broken, leaving thousands of animals to starve. The Bureau of Land Management says that the nearly 27 million acres it manages for wild horses and burros can sustain only about 27,000 animals. This year, the bureau estimates that there were more than 72,000 wild horses on the land, almost 50,000 too many and all fighting to survive.
...
"This isn’t just a horse management disaster, it’s a financial disaster too. In addition to the 72,000 horses it oversees on the range, the B.L.M. keeps about 45,000 horses that it has removed from the wild in corrals, off-range pastures and in sanctuaries. Over their lifetime, these horses will cost taxpayers roughly $1 billion overall, according to the B.L.M. That’s $1 billion we could otherwise spend on defense, education, job training or any other worthy cause.
...
"the bulk of the blame lies with shortsighted decision-making by misinformed but well-meaning members of Congress.

"Congress had once supported laws that allowed for proper management of these animals. Horses in excess of what the land could sustain were to be captured, put up for adoption, sold without restriction — including to slaughterhouses, which the B.L.M. does not do as a matter of policy — and as a last resort, humanely euthanized. The program wasn’t perfect, but the B.L.M. was able to keep the herds’ numbers in check while ensuring that the ranges were viable and healthy year after year.

"But since 2010, Congress has used annual appropriations acts to significantly restrict the ability of the B.L.M. to sell or euthanize horses. "
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This is clearly not the situation intended by those who put in place the laws and regulations that prevent wild horse populations from being managed.  Maybe it's time to eat horsemeat, for the sake of the horses?  Not likely soon in the U.S.: see my previous posts on that...

Breast milk sales and bans

Cambodia is banning more than surrogacy (see Wednesday's post):
Ban on breast milk sales throws spotlight on growing international trade

"Cambodian authorities have permanently banned the sale and export of human breast milk after suspending exports from a US company that has been collecting it from impoverished mothers for more than two years.

The ban has put the spotlight on a global trade in breast milk to other mothers, bodybuilders, cancer patients and breast-milk fetishists.

 ...
Cambodian women have been earning between $US7 and $US10 ($9 to $13) a day for selling their milk to the company.

Ambrosia Labs issued a statement saying "we believe in empowering the mothers of Cambodia with a way to make money while nurturing their families, as well as others, through the donation of their excess milk".

"We work hard to set and monitor guidelines to ensure that we are not taking milk out of infants' mouths," the company said, adding it does not accept milk from mothers of infants younger than six months.

But Ing Kantha Phavi, Cambodia's Minister of Women's Affairs, said the sale of breast milk could stunt children's growth and development and thwart the government's efforts to promote breastfeeding among new mothers.

The ban has been welcomed by the United Nations' children's agency, UNICEF, in a country where breastfeeding has been in decline.

"Breast milk could be considered as human tissue, the same as blood, and as such, its commercialisation in Cambodia should not be supported," the agency said.

"Cambodian welfare groups also welcomed the ban.

"Even if women agree to do it voluntarily, they often have no other choices and face economic pressure," said Ros Sopheap, the director of the women's rights group Gender and Development for Cambodia."
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In related news, here's a story from the South China Morning Post, about what appears to be a small but growing domestic market:
Chinese mums cash in on latest and lucrative craze: selling surplus breast milk
Although the trade is not large, the commodity can sell online for as much as US$22 per 250ml

Who finds sales of genetically modified food repugnant? (Hint: they are disgusted)

Here's a paper on a source of firm opposition to genetically modified food:

Sydney E. Scott, Yoel Inbar, and Paul Rozin
Evidence for Absolute Moral Opposition to Genetically Modified Food in the United States
Perspectives on Psychological Science May 2016 11: 315-324

Abstract

Public opposition to genetic modification (GM) technology in the food domain is widespread (Frewer et al., 2013). In a survey of U.S. residents representative of the population on gender, age, and income, 64% opposed GM, and 71% of GM opponents (45% of the entire sample) were “absolutely” opposed—that is, they agreed that GM should be prohibited no matter the risks and benefits. “Absolutist” opponents were more disgust sensitive in general and more disgusted by the consumption of genetically modified food than were non-absolutist opponents or supporters. Furthermore, disgust predicted support for legal restrictions on genetically modified foods, even after controlling for explicit risk–benefit assessments. This research suggests that many opponents are evidence insensitive and will not be influenced by arguments about risks and benefits.

Reducing the cruelty in food--WSJ on trends in veal production

As we get more prosperous, we are becoming more concerned about what we eat. Here's a story from the WSJ about veal--meat from calves.

Why You Might Consider Ordering the Veal--More-palatable production methods are helping restore veal to restaurant menus  By MATTHEW KRONSBERG

"LIKE MANY WHO came of age in the 1980s, I spent years not ordering veal. News stories about the mistreatment of the calves made veal synonymous with cruelty. Images of young animals confined to constrictive crates to prevent muscle development and promote ultra-tender meat left me, and many others, with little appetite for it.

"So it has come as a surprise, recently, to see veal on the menu in restaurants known for the conscientious sourcing of their meat.
...
"Could veal be making a comeback? In mass-market terms, it’s unlikely. Annual U.S. consumption has fallen from 2.3 pounds per capita in 1986 to 0.3 pounds in 2014. Supply-side issues are a factor—gender-selection methods now used in dairy-cow breeding have reduced the number of superfluous male calves, the main source of the veal industry’s livestock, and a high demand for beef has also diverted more dairy calves to beef production. Yet it’s worth noting that in the U.K. and EU, where crating veal calves was banned in 1990 and 2007 respectively, consumption has increased. While there’s still no ban stateside, the American Veal Association has set a goal for members to voluntarily eliminate crates by 2017, said association president, Dale Bakke.

"Many small producers have already adopted more humane practices. The veal served at Upland and Cypress Tavern hews closely to the European style of husbandry, with calves raised in group pens or even open pasture. "

There is no law against cannibalism in England

The Guardian has the story: Eating people is wrong, but is it against the law?

"Has José Salvador Alvarenga been reaching for the fava beans and chianti? The 36-year-old sailor survived at sea for more than a year after being cast adrift by a storm. But now the family of his fellow sailor, 22-year-old Ezequiel Córdoba, say the older man turned cannibal to survive. Alvarenga insists Córdoba died because he could not stomach the raw birds and turtle blood that were their only source of food. But Córdoba’s family are suing the Salvadorian fisherman for $1m for eating their relative.

It would not be the first time a survivor in extreme circumstances had tucked in to a fellow traveller. After a plane crash in the Andes in 1972, passengers ate the frozen remains of those who had perished, surviving 72 days before they were rescued. In 2000, three migrants from the Dominican republic survived for three weeks when their boat engine failed at sea, only by devouring some of the 60 others who succumbed to dehydration and exposure.

But is eating someone’s flesh in such extreme conditions against the law? Not in the UK, according to Samantha Pegg, senior lecturer at Nottingham Trent University. “There is no offence of cannibalism in our jurisdiction,” Dr Pegg says. She points out that Alvarenga’s story is similar to a famous case in legal history. In 1884, a four-man crew sailing from England to Australia were shipwrecked with almost no food. When the 17-year-old cabin boy became ill, two of the men, Stephens and Dudley, decided to kill and eat him. Five days later they were rescued and charged with murder. The third man was not charged, despite eating his companion’s flesh. Although their lawyers argued that killing the cabin boy was a necessity for the survival of the three other men, Stephens and Dudley wereconvicted of murder and sentenced to death – later commuted to six months’ imprisonment. “This set a precedent that there is no necessity defence for murder,” points out Pegg.

In cases of serial killers or sexually motivated cannibals, the charge is always murder, she says. In Germany, where there is also no offence of cannibalism, a court had to wrestle with a case where a man “offered” himself to be killed and consumed by an IT expert called Armin Meiwes – Meiwes was still convicted of murder. Last year, a German police officer was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years for a similar crime of “murder and disturbing the peace of the dead”. However, because his victim was said to be “willing”, he was not given the maximum sentence.

Other would-be cannibals could face charges of outraging public decency or preventing a lawful burial, says Pegg. In 1988, performance artist Rick Gibson ate human tonsils on the street; he claims to be “the first cannibal in British history to legally eat human meat in public.” With a rise in “body food”, and eating your partner’s placenta, he may not be the last."