Free bin score. Nice graphs about the impending real estate collapse, which is something I found personally interesting to be reading, as I was in the process of doing that home equity bullshit thing, but nowhere near the max, so as to pay off all credit cards my family has so that we can escape the evil devil clutches of credit card companies and the credit card scam itself. However, like any addiction, my American addiction to having shit will test my resolve in future months, I’m sure. I’ve been reading up on a lot of backwoods paranoid survivalist shit lately, so I think I’m pretty good and spooked about impending Armageddon again. After Y2K, and then the excitement of 9/11, I kind of waned away end-times thinking, which made me soft when it came to shit like trusting fake money that doesn’t exist. Hopefully, I’ll stay ultra-aware from here out though.
This issue had a crazy crazy article about the pork industry though, and the thing I like about Harper’s is they tend to hire articles that aren’t “Ooh, big corporations fucked and evil kill babies vote obama!” so much as just goofy gonzo-lite explorations of the subject at hand. This pig farming article was such an article. The two most interesting of-note tidbits that dug into my brain were that, first of all, Smithfield went heavy into genetic engineering of pigs to make them the same size regularly, so that runts got killed off, because of their processing plants having mechanized knives that demand animals of exact proportions so the knife, when dialed in, cuts at the correct spot. That’s some weird shit to have gotten to from the original idea of eating a damned pig because it looked fleshy enough to have some good meat on it. The second thing I found interesting is how most non-big pig farm pork is bought by the Japanese, who also command the highest quality beef as well. I remember a few years back reading about how most chicken breasts stay in America, and they send all the shitty brown meat (which is my favorite, of course) to Mexico and other parts much poorer. However, when it comes to eating high on the hog (or cow), we as Americans are not on top of that ladder, because we’re too cheap to appreciate good meat. Although, I don’t know if that’s true so much as we don’t have the options anymore and we are pretty apathetic about shoving whatever’s shoved down our throats. It just so happens in the case of shitty pork meat, that metaphor’s literal.
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