In July of 2011, after a run of 50 years, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange ended the trading of pork belly futures. There was a time when the consumption of bacon, the most critical third of a BLT, saw a bump in the summer, and the future price of pork belly was something of an indicator …
Got a call from a Bangor TV station today looking for a ten minute good-news interview about something positive happening in my town. (Full disclosure: This was not a random inquiry; I’m part of town government.) The station is going to be in the neighborhood tomorrow to film a segment on the sale of the …
This week the New York Times reported that we’re one step closer to using pigs as organ donors thanks to breakthroughs in gene-editing. I wonder what would happen if we had to choose between using pigs to save lives and using pigs for bacon. With a carefully worded ballot question, bacon might come out on top …
I just finished Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals. It’s an engaging and informative exploration of what it means to eat meat which, 99 percent of the time, means eating products of the industrial food system. If there’s any point driven home consistently and powerfully over the course of the book, it’s that our system of …