Bonnie Bucqueroux's Open Salon Blog

You've been dead 15 years now - could we save you today?

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 10:08:05 -0400

Kim and I at her wedding

It has been 15 years since we talked, and now this is the only way I can talk at you, not with you.

I also know how much you would hate not being able to argue back. See? You should have taken better care of yourself. (Imagine me wagging my finger.)

It was August 25, 1995, when I called the Royal Oak police and asked them to do a wellness check on you, my then-34-year-old stepdaughter. That's when we learned you had died, apparently from a brain bleed that resulted from a fall at home - a fall that resulted from the escalating wave of seizures brought on by the toxic combination of alcoholism and bulimia. The end of our conversation.

I taught myself web design a year later, in order to post the Kimmy site on the first anniversary of your death. I wanted to tell the story of your life to warn others of the dangers of pouring alcohol on top of an eating disorder.

In 1995, there were only 100,000 personal sites on the web. In that pre-Google era, you found the Kimmy site by going to Yahoo's directory and looking under the letter B for Bucqueroux. Back then, we were just learning about the problem. The Kimmy site and Something Fishy were some of the only resources online about eating disorders.

Put alcohol+bulimia into Google today, and the search engine generates 9,740,000 entries. Yet the question that haunts me is whether a young woman like you would stand a better chance of survival today.

More awareness - not enough answers

CBS even put "serious" journalist Katie Couric on a Photoshop diet
Sifting through the first of those more than nine million Google entries on alcoholism and bulimia shows that we are doing a better job of talking about and studying the problem. But we still have no concrete answers about how best to treat this dual diagnosis. The web offers sufferers information and opportunities to share their stories and ask questions in forums, but is that enough?

There are an estimated 10 million American women with eating disorders. And as many as a million men and boys are suffering as well.

Women with serious eating disorders exhibit the highest death rate of any mental illness second only to depression. Studies show 18% to 20% of women with serious eating disorders will be dead after 20 years. With treatment, the rate falls to 2%.

So the answer seems simple - get treated.

Yet making that happen isn't easy. Many sufferers will literally fight to the death to avoid facing their problems. And even those who do may find it hard to find good care that they can afford.

As anyone who has watched Dr. Drew Pinsky's "Celebrity Rehab" understands, dealing with people overwhelmed with self-destructive behaviors takes enormous patience and tolerance. At first, I was repelled by watching people hell-bent on killing themselves. I felt the same anger and frustration that I experienced in trying to persuade you to get help, Kim. But then I began to understand and then accept that denial is inextricably wound into the disease itself.

Alcoholism and bulimia are both diseases of denial. Studies show alcoholics suffer higher rates of bulimia, while other studies confirm that bulimics suffer higher rates of alcoholism. The combination of both kills quicker.

Less than a month before your death, you ended up in the emergency room because of a fall from a seizure. Even though testing showed your blood alcohol level high was enough to render most people unconscious, you refused to admit you had been drinking. And the self-hate associated with your bulimia kept you from admitting that to your doctors as well, though they knew.

Would today's online support groups have helped you cut through the denial? Something Fishy still tops the list in most search engines because it's online forum focuses on the positive. It even deals with the underlying issue that young men are socialized to reject full-figured females as sexually unacceptable.

If that resource had been available to you, Kimmy, would it have helped? Or was the well of your self-loathing so deep that nothing could touch it?

Worrisome as well is that alongside the therapeutic forums are the "pro-ana" (pro-anorexia) websites that offer tips on how to do all the wrong things.

Solutions must include changing the culture

Now, 15 years later, I am increasingly aware of the fact that eating disorders and alcoholism are not only individual but societal problems. We must always keep trying to save people one by one, but we should not ignore the need to fight back against corporations who profit from exploiting our insecurities and those whose bottom line remains blacker if they deny us help.

We still live in a culture where eight out of 10 women are dissatisfied with their bodies. That is no better now than it was when you were struggling.

Yes, there are positive efforts. The National Organization for Women sponsors Love Your Body Day. The Dove folks have that marvelous series of commercials with full-figured women and this one on what models really look like.

But before we get misty-eyed about the great work Dove is doing, remember that it is owned by Unilever, the same corporation that hawks Axe, which uses the same old and tired stereotypes - the ones that still work.

The advertising industry is still built on bombarding us with images that tell us that scarecrow skinny is the ideal.

Merchandisers use Photoshop to create bodies unattainable in real life

Which one do you like better? Doesn't matter. The advertising gods have spoken

Promo for Tyra Banks shows this 6-foot-2 model with the tiny waist and we all collude in the fiction she's healthy

We often dismiss these problems as the by-products of "affluenza." How awful that you starve yourself in the midst of all this abundance. How terrible that you drink yourself to death when the world is your oyster.

But isn't that just a fancy way of blaming victims who are drowning in the toxic soup of media images that tell women they are unworthy? And we still call binge drinking "partying" as if it were fun.

Hardest of all is to talk money. The fact is, treating such disorders is expensive, and insurance companies fight tooth-and-nail to avoid any burden. I remember the weekend when we finally intervened and forced you into treatment here at St. Lawrence. But your husband's insurance balked at paying for in-patient treatment, so you opted for day treatment back home in Royal Oak. Then that program kicked you out a week later for failing the Breathalyzer. If you had still been treated in a hospital with no access to alcohol, would you have been saved?

It stuns me to think you would soon be turning 50. What kind of woman would you be now? Would you be happy? Or was your death actually self-inflicted as a way to end the pain of not loving yourself?

In many ways, I have even more questions now than I did then. Bottom line for me is that I still cry on occasion thinking about all you have missed. I warned you that life is not a dress rehearsal. And, looking around, I am not so sure we could save you even if we all had a second chance.

But all I can say with certainty is that I still miss you, kid. I am sorry that I did not have the right answers to save you then. So all I can do now is push back against a culture that keeps hurting others.

The Swiffer: A sure sign of the End Times

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 13:06:47 -0400

As I hunkered down in the basement with my dogs yet again, fearful that the latest wave of dangerous weather would blow us away, I could almost hear the planet screaming to warn us that we are rushing headlong off the environmental cliff.

Climate change is real. Glaciers are melting, the permafrost in Alaska is thawing and wildfires from Florida to California start earlier, last longer and consume more and more acres. The recent heatwave in India killed more than 100 people when the temperature reached a stomach-churning 122 degrees.

Yet some folks stubbornly cling to the notion that today's climate catastrophes are part of a natural cycle. I prefer to blame the Swiffer®.

Indulge me as I explain the logic. Petroleum, the oozy-woozy miracle that fuels our cars and serves as the raw material for the plastic IV lines that can save my life, is also a curse that is fouling our air, land and water. Like addicts everywhere, we got ourselves hooked when oil was cheap, abundant and easy to extract.

But now that oil is becoming increasingly expensive, scarce and dangerous to harvest, we show no signs of changing our junkie ways. Which leads us to the Swiffer®.

Ponder for a moment, if you will, the amount of fossil fuels required to manufacture, distribute and market the Swiffer duster®. Think of the energy used to light those air-conditioned superstores we drive to en masse, on whose shelves the heavily packaged Swiffer® duster resides until you but it. Imagine the gasoline it takes to bring those cute little Swiffers® home from the store.

Get the picture?

Then there is the escalation when Proctor and Gamble realized the Swiffer duster® was a big hit. Additions to the Swiffer® family now include:

the Wet Jet® , a (mercury-laden-battery)-powered gizmo that spews what appears to be antifreeze on your floors, which the machine then sops up with microfiber pads,
the Swiffer sweeper® (which boasts an extra-large version) and
the Swiffer sweeper/vac® , which many people buy in addition to a budget-busting Dyson® that burns gazillions of electrons to do what a carpet beater and broom used to do just fine.

Then, just in case we are not squandering enough petroleum, P&G has added Swiffer Dust & Shine®, a Pledge®-like product scented with three Febreze® fragrances, in case the kids playing in your home have not yet inhaled their required childhood quota of dubious chemicals. (And we wonder why so many frogs today have three eyes and a leg growing out of their ear?)

This does not even begin to address the difficulty in ridding ourselves of discarded Swiffers. No doubt many will survive in various landfills until the day our sun goes supernova.

But the fault lies not in the Swiffer® itself but in a culture where such products are considered a great idea. (A post on Squidoo calls the Swiffer® the "best cleaning invention of the 20th and 21st century [sic].")

There was a time when people used worn-out t-shirts and towels, cut into strips, as cleaning cloths. They were stored in the rag bag hidden in the closet. You would grab one, maybe cut it to just the right size, and then dunk it in a little vinegar and water if you wanted a pleasant scent and a nice shine. After laundering many times, the holiest cloths would finally be sacrificed for cleaning paint brushes or shining shoes before being discarded.

I think of my grandmother, who survived the Depression by working to support her daughters as a cleaning woman in downtown office buildings in Cleveland. She insisted that the invention of the paper towel was a sure sign we would follow the Roman empire into decline.

If we had stopped at the paper towel, we might have had a chance. The Swiffer® may be a sign that it is too late, because other cultures that still use rags instead of petroleum-dense cleaning products lust for the chance to live as we do now. So even more wars will be fought among nations contesting to secure the oil needed to make more Swiffers®.

I have nightmares about a day in the not-too-distant future when I am lying there in a hospital bed, in dire need of IV drugs for dengue fever because Michigan is now the tropics, and a nurse will whisper in my ear, "Sorry, but we don't have any more IV lines. We used up all the petroleum on making Swiffers® instead."

Is there any doubt that the End Times are near?

We need a new New Journalism

Wed, 6 Jan 2010 13:01:52 -0500

The new year dawns, and the mainstream media still find themselves in the tank.

Advertisers prove increasingly unwilling to board the Titanic, as evidenced by Pepsi pulling its ads from the Super Bowl in favor of spending $20 million on social media instead.

Local newspapers and TV stations watch their subscribers and viewers jump ship, and not enough young people are being lured into taking their place to keep the enterprises from sinking. The mass exodus of advertisers and customers leaves reporters and editors playing polar bear, clinging to a rapidly melting iceberg with no climate treaty rescue in sight.

What to do? How do we tempt young people away from texting, tweeting and Facebooking? How can we make them eat their spinach - or do we just give in and shovel up a few local headlines, some celebrity news and a Sudoku puzzle?

A multimedia quick fix?

The prevailing hope among many professionals and academics seems to be that online news will eventually disgorge a business model that will restore the glory days of yore. Until then, just keep training young journalists (and re-training the old ones) as multimedia storytellers. Yes, that's the ticket.

And don't get me wrong. No one is more excited about the potential for online multimedia than I. (I have uploaded more than 350 videos on YouTube and will achieve one million views sometime this year.)

It gladdens my flinty heart to see Adam Westerbrook offer a list of 10 things reporters can do in the new year to make themselves better multimedia journalists. I am also heartened to see journalism schools including my own getting serious about revamping their core courses to include digital storytelling.

And I love the new mini-docs that news organizations such as the Toronto Globe and Mail are producing ("Raven and Jason" and the "A Farm Family" break the mold).

But if the mainstream media merely transfer the same tired formulas and outmoded ethos of objectivity to the online world, online journalism risks becoming irrelevant on even more platforms.

A hunger for authenticity

The online revolution requires more than teaching print reporters to shoot video. Attracting young people raised on Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" requires fresh thinking about stale standards. Isn't it time to move beyond teaching the same tired formulas - the trend story, the meeting story, the obit? Doesn't each story deserve its own treatment or why bother running it?

Even more soul-deadening is the reflexive insistence that objectivity is the holy grail of American journalism. Reporters are reduced to playing tennis referee, balancing spin from one side with spin from the other, all the while pretending that what they are offering up matters.

Meanwhile, Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi and cable TV's Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow grow in popularity by embracing elements of Jon Stewart'a shtick. There's money in funny (and in clever, insightful and snarky, too)

Everything old is new again

The good news is that we've been here before, so the lessons are clear.

The cultural shift that included the invention of the teenager after World War II ushered in a new world, and traditional media found it difficult to speak to that new educated, sophisticated and somewhat jaded generation. The first rumblings of a New Journalism began in the 50s, when the best and brightest fiction writers began to look at journalism as fertile ground for their talents.

Author Norman Mailer was considered a frontrunner in the race to produce the Great American Novel. But he and his friends instead launched the weekly alternative newspaper The Village Voice in 1955, to showcase a new kind of journalism that borrowed the techniques of fiction and applied them to telling true stories. The L.A. Free Press added a west coast variant to the growing number of alternative newspapers in 1964. Unique voices, strong views, political engagement and advocacy.

Harold Hayes became editor of Esquire in 1961, shaking up that stodgy men's magazine by commissioning pieces from Mailer, Joan Didion, Tim O'Brien, Gay Talese, Terry Southern and Dotson Rader. Under Editor Warren Hinckle,Ramparts published Eldridge Cleaver's "Soul on Ice."(Ramparts remains famous locally for revealing Michigan State University's ties to the CIA during the Viet Nam era.) In 1967, Jann Wenner began publishing Rolling Stone, and Clay Felker left Esquire a year later to found New York magazine, expanding the universe of places young people could go for news written in a way that spoke to them.

In the summer of 1969, Mailer and columnist Jimmy Breslin blurred the lines even further by running for office in New York, with Mailer a mayoral candidate and Breslin running for city council. Underscoring their concerns if not contempt for traditional news media, they issued an open letter to the New York Times that included the following:

Can it be that the apparent desire of this city to destroy itself can be found in the newspapers themselves? God, they do not even honor their own. They seem to assume that used-up politicians, implicated politicians, and politicians with tongues waxed in old dead liberal wax are going to know more about running this city than two writers who have spent their last twenty years separately brooding, working, and writing about the problems of man and society, and the streets and people of this city.

Not your father's objective journalism, that's for sure.

This new tribe rapidly dominated popular culture. Truman Capote invented the "non-fiction (crime) novel" with "In Cold Blood." Tom Wolfe chronicled Ken Kesey and his friends' journey into the psychedelicized brain of the new drug culture with the "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." Joan Didion captured the ennui attendant upon the death of the West as the embodiment of the American Dream in "Slouching Toward Bethlehem." And Hunter S. Thompson invented gonzo journalism when he literally puts his life on the line to produce "Hell's Angels."

New York Times columnist Frank Rich reminds us that, by 1968, Esquire magazine's Hayes dispatched William ("Naked Lunch") Burroughs and homosexual playwright Jean Genet as its "reporters" to cover the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Harper's magazine sent Mailer, whose essays were published as "Miami and the Siege of Chicago," the companion to his Pulitzer-Prize-winning "Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History." Though he writes in the third person, Mailer injected himself into every aspect of the story with writing that is deeply political without being stridently partisan. (I remember being stunned at Mailer's line about how the women who supported McGovern would find vinegar as their preferred aphrodisiac.)

This tribe of exuberant outsiders scared the bejesus out of the mainstream media of the time. I am old enough to remember the ferocity of the backlash, as traditionalists argued that literary techniques trivialized serious reporting and that eschewing objectivity would lead to the destruction of American journalism (and maybe the end of Western Civilization as well).

A few years later, however, news organizations and journalism schools were jumping on board the literary bandwagon, eager to teach reporters who to employ literary devices to tell stories. (The objectivity issue remained a deal-breaker, of course.) By the mid-70s, even the farm magazine that I wrote for was urging its reporters to employ imagery, foreshadowing, alliteration. A company-wide writing contest was judged by the then-dean of the Medill School of Journalism who advised us that "it is better to leave your readers throwing up than falling asleep."

Back to the future

I long for Mailer's nuanced assessments and startling insights almost as much as I miss Hunter Thompson's screeds. (HST: "America...just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.")

There's a reason that many of my students still know Hunter's name and find his articles as relevant today as they were then.

Which is why many of us will forgive Matt Taibbi his occasional errors and excesses in order to enjoy his role as Rolling Stone's resident gonzo. His "Inside the Great Bubble Machine" summed up the feelings many people have about Wall Street when he wrote, "The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."

In traditional journalistic fashion, Tim Fernholz of The American Prospect relentlessly takes Taibbi to task for inaccuracies. All too often, mainstreamers don't seem to care if you get the big things wrong as long as you spell all the names right. The New York Times has pretty much been silent or wrong on all of the major stories of the past decade (the threat of Al Qaeda, Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the financial collapse), yet they are still considered the gold standard.

My argument is not that every story must take a stand. In an online world, hyperlocal breaking news is the low-hanging fruit best harvested by citizens who just need to tell the story straight. But important and complex stories cry out for clever and clear analysis and the logical conclusions that follow. When reporters fail to share what they have learned, I would argue that they reduce rather than enhance the likelihood that the public will trust them.

Am I really supposed to believe that reporters who spend their lives covering politics don't care enough to take a position on the issues? Even more worrisome is that news organizations would want to hire people who are not passionate about politics to report on issues that affect real people's lives.

I would argue that public confidence in the mainsteam media has eroded because of the preposterous proposition that objectivity is both attainable and desirable. The popularity of opinionated bloggers suggests that people don't want objectivity as much as they long for authenticity leavened with heavy doses of transparency.

News consumers know that reporters have opinions. An honest relationship depends on having journalists disclose their biases while laying out their analysis and their conclusions. To do otherwise in an era when birthers, deathers and other uninformed conspiracists upload hate and misinformation every moment risks ceding the online world to the fringe.

If we remember our roots, our country enshrined free speech in its Constitution because pamphleteers such as Tom Paine wanted to carve out space for engaged citizens to share not only facts but opinions. These are indeed times that try men's souls, and we need more Matt Taibbi's who tell the truth so forcefully, clearly and cleverly that we must pay attention.

What do atheists do for Christmas?

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 11:12:02 -0500

The glib answer, of course, is that we do the same thing that we do for Hanukah and Eid. However, in my role as resident atheist, I think the question deserves a fuller answer. (I may not play an atheist on TV, but I do guest lecture as the area's proto-atheist in my friend and colleague Sue Carter's "Religion and the Media" class.)

The first challenge in dealing with non-believers is to distinguish between atheists, agnostics and those who are just too lazy to go to church (synagogue or mosque). There is now a spectrum of freethinkers who fall somewhere between the belligerently anti-clerical Christopher ("God Is Not Great") Hitchens, the cerebral Richard ("The Evolution of God") Wright (seen debating each other on the New York Times site) and the Brights, friendly folk who define themselves as naturalistic, free of supernatural and mystical elements, by which they mean "no god" but without being nasty about it.

I personally embrace the term ignostic, which means I don't know whether I believe as you do until you define what you mean by god. If by god you mean Bart Stupak or Mike Huckabee's white-bearded white guy who will smite you if you fail to follow outdated rules written thousands of years ago in a sexist, homophobic and racist agricultural culture somewhere in the Middle East, then consider me a fire-breathing atheist in response. But if you mean the warm and welcoming spirituality of a Deepak Chopra, we can talk.

Bill O'Reilly may think there's a war on Christmas, but I find the season tests even the most charitable ignostic.

It was the Salvation Army bell-ringers who drove my mother over the top. We could not pass one without her ranting about how evil it is to make drunks listen to sermons before feeding them. (I assume she had her father/my granddad in mind. Both of us had little doubt our always-inebriated patriarch would starve on the street before pretending to pray just to eat.)

My biggest frustration as a religion-less child was finding that Christmas Eve ushered in two solid days of bad TV. A television-addicted child of the Fifties, I would look forward to the two weeks free of school as a chance to hunker down in front of the old Philco, only to find all three networks began showing Catholic masses on Christmas Eve. Isn't this America? Land of the free?

I spent my youth pointedly refusing to add the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance after Eisenhower inserted them. I was the heathen youngster banished to the hallway each morning when the principal in my rural Ohio school would defy the Supreme Court ban on school prayer by reciting from the Bible over the PA. ("Bonnie will now leave the classroom because SHE and her family doesn't believe in God," he would intone each morning.) But allowing the networks to blizzard me with religious propaganda crossed a line that supposedly objective newscasters still blur. (You know who you are, CNN's Don Lemon.)

I watched my parents wrestle with the issue of whether to buy a Christmas tree. Brotherhood bush?

Yet I must admit to experiencing a sense of joy one Christmas Eve when I joined my friend Karen and her family at the local Unitarian Church's midnight celebration. The church was filled with blazing candles and hundreds of red and white poinsettias, and the enlightened minister thankfully never said anything about any god. Do Unitarian-Universalists qualify as real Christians in the eyes of a Pat Robertson or Pat Boone?

The period around the winter solstice is a great time for a festive celebration to remind us that spring will come someday (unless global warming triggers a new ice age). Even the imperial Romans shed their togas and boogied down with their slaves during the week-long holiday called Saturnalia, which was already a hand-me-down from earlier cultures. Today's pagans still dance naked and burn money. (Not as appealing since the advent of my middle-age paunch.) Seinfeld inspired the new holiday Festivus, with its aluminum pole (as our own Rico Tom Rico recounts in his re-gifting of "A Holiday Tale Retold").

But rather than take up arms against Christmas cheer, perhaps it is time for me to mellow and go with the flow. At least until I run into a bell-ringer or a Sarah Palin end-timer.

Ho, ho, ho and a happy Kwanzaa to you.

Poison burgers - we are what we eat

Sun, 4 Oct 2009 13:10:42 -0400

If you ever wanted proof that corporations matter more than people in our society, you need not look further than the New York Times article on how 22-year-old Stephanie Smith was poisoned by the O157:H7 strain of coli that contaminated a "burger" from food giant Cargill. As we learn in the article, this isn't a case where a diseased animal somehow found its way into the food chain. It is a harrowing account of how industrial food is killing and maiming us.

Stephanie, a children's dance teacher who rarely ate meat, did consume a hamburger her mother cooked for Sunday dinner in 2007. Not long afterward, Stephanie suffered diarrhea, then bloody diarrhea and finally her kidneys shut down. Doctors put her into a nine-week coma (e coli poisoning reportedly hurts worse than childbirth), and now she may never walk again.

In the article, we learn that the burger she ate was created from so many gut-churning quasi-meat components that tracing the problem back to its source almost becomes meaningless:

"[T]he hamburgers were made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps . . . ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria."

"Mash-like product"? And people wonder why I am a vegetarian?

In addition to confirming that our food system is broken, the article illustrates how our political system fails us because corporate cash matters more than individual contributions. Yes, a talented politician such as President Obama succeeded in attracting millions of supporters, many of whom sent him relatively small campaign donations. But their collective voices do not deliver a unified message in the same way that food corporation lobbyists can capture the ears of the people who matter at the White House and in Congress.

If this were not the case, would we have a system where corporations can produce toxic mystery meat as long as doing so is 25% cheaper? In a true perversion of transparency, "Many big slaughterhouses will sell only to grinders who agree not to test their shipments for E. coli, according to officials at two large grinding companies. Slaughterhouses fear that one grinder’s discovery of E. coli will set off a recall of ingredients they sold to others." Profits before people.

The article goes on to quote Dr. Jeffrey Bender from the University of Minnesota who warns, "Ground beef is not a completely safe product." He also notes that instead of making us safer, our current meat inspection system is "going a bit in the opposite direction."

Even that mild criticism means that Dr. Bender will likely face enormous pressure to retract his statement or say no more. In these cash-strapped times, the academic freedom to speak out often runs afoul of the pressure to remain silent, to keep the government and corporate grants flowing.

The rest of the unnerving article is a litany of sickening corporate abuse. The speedup of the line at slaughterhouses makes inspection meaningless as the animals whiz by. Slaughterhouse workers protest that they are not given time to clean their knives, even though the new strains of e coli are hideously virulent pathogens unlike any we have seen before. (Incubated in those Confined Animal Feeding Operations perhaps? And if you think ours are bad, just imagine what they must be like in Uruguay.)

The article also notes that hamburger today not only contains animal products but bread crumbs and spices that aren't even listed on the label. Amazing indeed since there is growing evidence that imported spices are an increasingly worrisome source of food contamination.

One of my biggest surprises while covering agriculture in the Seventies and Eighties was how much money and time food corporations expend in fighting for specific language in regulations that allow them to do things that would literally make their customers sick, if they knew. What you eat is the product of intense lobbying in Washington, where loosening a regulation or adding a loophole blackens the corporate bottom line even though it would make most people see red.

Yet at a deeper level, it really doesn't matter what the regulations say when food corporations consciously ignore complaints about basic sanitation. The article notes that Cargill's own inspectors had complained that the plant that produced the burger that poisoned Stephanie suffered from cases where there were hamburger patties on the floor and "gnarly" old bits of meat in the grinders. Yet the company apparently did nothing to correct the problems, at least in time to save Stephanie.

But won't the massive lawsuits the companies face pressure them to make our food safer? They help, but they are no panacea. Lawsuits typically drag on for years and years, and those that settle before trial often require that all records are sealed, so we never learn what the problem really was. Moreover, Cargill could end up off the hook if evidences proves that the contaminated meat came from a subsidiary, which is why corporations push back against any attempt at real transparency.

So what should a meat eater do? Find a local, sustainable farmer and buy direct. Or find an old-fashioned butcher shop where they will let you see how they produce their hamburger. Or you can reward those corporations that push back against abuses. Costco tests the trimmings for e coli before making its hamburger. And, though Tyson disputes the allegation, Costco says that their policy is why the slaughterhouse will not sell to them. On a larger scale, you can support politicians who vote for legislation that favors sustainable agriculture over short-term, bottom-line thinking.

We should also praise and support the New York Times for this article. It takes time and talent to investigate industries that spend a fortune to remain under the public radar. Every word must be bullet-proof or they could find themselves facing a lawsuit. Remember when Oprah was sued by the Texas cattlemen for "disparagement" of their product? It takes the deep pockets of news organizations such as the New York Times to produce, publicize and defend stories such as these.