Eat this

In spite of my strong ethical concerns around food (and my belief that not eating your veggies might make you crazy--look to Britney Spears for evidence of that bit of wisdom) and the fact that I've been an on-again-off-again vegetarian for years (I eat meat now, but hardly ever, and only when I've met the farmer, or really trust the restaurant) I generally think that Peta is a pretty fucking stupid organization, a belief that was recently strengthened when they bought my mailing address from some other group and sent me a plea for donations, thinly veiled as a questionaire, which included two pages of address labels. Now, my background in psychology and media theory makes me privy to the knowledge that groups like Peta give people those kinds of freebies in order to guilt us into making donations--studies have shown that when people don't donate, they don't use the labels. Now, I don't want to use about a 1/3 of the labels they sent me, because they say "Peta" on them, and I don't want anybody to think that I'm a blood-hurling hater. (Disclaimer: I would never buy a real, new fur, but I do own a fake one, as well as a vintage wool cape w/a fur-lined hood that my gramma gave me. I also hate factory farms, pet factory farms, and stuff like that.) I'm gonna snip the Peta logo off and use them anyway--take that, Peta!

I hope a) that you're still with me after that long intro and b) that you'll forgive my long-windedness (I named this blog Mouthy Femme for a reason) but anyway, Peta redeemed themselves by a smidge when I ran across this little bit of brilliance while I was pretending to work today. I can say for Peta that they are pretty brilliant promoters--they've got star power galore--but teaming up with Free Range Studios, the geniuses that produced Store Wars and this little Garth Brooks/Walmart video, may have been their smartest move yet.

I'm not all that keen on the impotence argument, but it beats shaming a marginally chubby do-gooder for not taking on the meat industry (to be fair, Al Gore did deserve to be shamed for failing to mention the meat industry's substantial contribution to Global Warming, but "characture-izing" him as a sloppy chickenshit was unfair, in my opinion). And of course, this video was like some kind of weird dream where political candidates actually discuss food, which is a hope I hold near to my heart.

Speaking of shaming fatties, have any of you seen this bit of fascist insanity? I got it from a food listserv and thought that maybe it was some kind of sick joke but I poked around and see that it's true: Mississippi lawmakers are trying to bar restaurants from serving food to people with a BMI over 30. For those of you who may not know, Mississippi is the fattest state in the country (you can see how fat your state is here) and has been for at least the last two years--I guess they think that publicly shaming and starving fatties into submission might knock them down in the rankings. Aside from stating the obvious by calling this idea fascist and insane, I'm pretty much speechless on this one. (I can hear your collective sigh of relief from here.) Ok. You can go now.