According to Wired magazine, farm-raised salmon flesh is not naturally pink. Wild salmon eat a type of krill that contains natural pigmentation coloring their meat. So salmon farmers present buyers with a color palette … which shade would you prefer your fish? They’ll dye it for you with a super-strength food coloring that can survive the cooking process. It also survives the digestive process, but that’s a whole other issue.

An outbreak of mad cow disease (one cow) in the U.S. called into question the entire slaughterhouse process. The cow was brought in dead, making us wonder why we think it’s appropriate to eat an animal which wasn’t healthy enough to walk to its own execution. Then the meat packers announced that they would no longer be mixing brain and spinal fluid and tissue with regular meat. Ewww. I’ll take the chicken, thank you, Miss.

Now an outbreak of Asian Chicken Flu has made it to the United States. What do you feed a chicken with a cold? I’m guessing that chicken soup is out of the question. Do you get the flu from eating these sickly birds? Scientists who track diseases are speculating that these unhealthy avians could start another flu epidemic similar to the 1918 influenza outbreak. This has prompted the second largest slaughter of chickens in the U.S., the first being Kentucky Fried Chicken’s $1.99 nugget special in the summer of ’92.

Salads are much safer. Legislation has been passed banning numerous pesticides (poisons) and chemical fertilizers (good for plant growth, bad for people) here in the United States. This was widely considered a good move and the topic moved off of the nation’s radar. The industries producing these toxins then were stuck with huge surpluses and production facilities and no market. So they turned to developing nations who didn’t have environmentalists looking after them. They were even able to bring out the recipes for some particularly lethal cocktails that were banned decades ago. Now in the interests of global trade, our food markets have opened up to these developing nations and those fruits and veggies treated so callously are now back in American supermarkets; comprising almost half of all imported foods. I’ll take the Tumor Caesar Salad, ma’am.

With pollution so high and rampant soil contamination and depletion, even organically grown fruits and vegetables contain trace elements of toxins either from the water, air, or soil. Unless hydroponically or greenhouse grown, they contain less nutrients and calories than their 19th century counterparts. Unless the trend is reversed then late 21st century veggies won’t be able to keep anything above the size of a small rat alive. While some of you may think that fewer calories in a salad might be the best thing since the Atkin’s diet, just wait until we face real starvation in the United States; widespread, constant, and long-term starvation.

The bottom line is that the rich who control the factories and government, as well as you and I who give them power, need to learn that the line separating the self from others is an artificial one. What hurts you, my friend, also hurts me. Ultimately, all gains made at the expense of others are short-term at best. We have to visualize our children and our children’s children walking hand-in-hand with our neighbor’s children, and children from across the globe. We can not think of humanity as an individual but as a gestalt. Only when everyone’s quality of life has been raised will we have achieved a true existence. Until then, we are less civilized than a tribe of Neanderthals living in a cave but caring for their young, the environment, and their aged relatives and we will have gained for ourselves no more right to the future of our species than the dinosaurs and the DoDo.