It was a meaty sort of day.

cinetrix (who I inadvertantly guilted into becoming my netflix friend, yeay!) has a great post and link about film noir.

As we know from the Cook book and the Bordwell and Thompson book, film noir, like Jazz (and up until recently “American” cars), is an American made art form. It was actually a bunch of French film scholars who gave it the cool name. What was it called before the appellation that began in the 40’s with Marcel Duhamel, Nino Frank, Jean-Pierre Chartier and then later propagated to iconic cinematic genre label by the Cahiers gang in the 70’s?

Le cinema du rouge-viande or as they say in America, red-meat movies.

This kind of relates to the other item I was going to post about today. The Consumerist points to this CBS news article about how the Agriculture Department wants to expand the definition of grass-fed beef to include cattle that doesn’t actually graze on grass.

It all just sounds so disingenuous, like a bunch of corporate cattle farms putting pressure on the agriculture department just so they can slap a “grass-fed” label on their steaks. Marketing, feh. Only big ass farms stand to gain from this.

The family farm? The ones who actually need the help? They don’t have the time or the energy to take advantage of the new rules. Let’s take Mary Milan’s family farm, they could stand to benefit from this. Their cows aren’t grass fed but would meet the new standards, plus, they aren’t fed steroids or antibiotics. But you know what they’re concerned with?

Day to day life. Working the farm. Keeping the cows clean and fed. There’s no staff. Just Mom and Dad Milan. And some high school kids who help out. There ain’t no one there to lobby for them and cut through the bureaucratic red tape to get them labeled “organic” or “grass-fed”. It’s just them.

Shit. This stuff makes my blood boil.

And, I still have an axe to grind with Whole Foods. The axe being: please for the love of Christ, stop selling shitty produce and propping up the corporate organic agricultural complex.

So fuck the agriculture department and meat lobbyists. I say let those big corporate farms, the same ones who grew your bagged, organic spinach that gave you e. coli, dilute the terms “organic” and “grass-fed.”

I say for all of you true farmers, the ones don’t feed shit to their cows because you believe that people shouldn’t eat that crap either, I say you unionize and come up with a new marketing term so that you can charge a super premium. I’m not sure what that label is but it might be something like, “The rib eye you are buying came from a heffer named Bessie. She was put to sleep via lethal injection. While Bessie was alive, she wasn’t fed anything that had anything resembling an antibiotic, hormone, or steroid; Alexander Fleming’s heirs, Jose Canesco, Barry Bonds, and Victor Conte did not come within 100 miles of our farm. We don’t use Raid or any other pesticides. Our air quality index is HIGH. She is survived by heffers Middie, Dede, and Philomena and a bull named Hank (who has not run in Pamplona, though he wishes to). The rib eye tastes good too. We guarantee every word on the label, except the previous sentence because there is no accounting for taste. If we are found to be liars, we will submit ourselves to whatever punishment via focus group which will be taped and broadcast over YouTube.”

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