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2004/06/08, 10:07 PM
:big_smile:I've told you all before about the havoc the Atkins diet has wreaked on the food industry - how sales of carb-heavy breads, pastas, pizza, cookies, desserts, and other foods are falling off in a big way because of people's increasing awareness that these refined, nutrition-less foodstuffs are actually killing them.
What are they eating instead? Increasingly, folks in the
know are eating meat, fish, eggs, fruits, nuts and certain
healthy vegetables (like potatoes, especially with the skins intact). In fact, prices of these items - but especially beef - have gone up considerably in just the last year or so, as you may well be aware. But apparently, beef has become so valuable that lawmen in some sections of the American west are once again facing down something they
haven't seen much of for a century or more...
Cattle rustling.
In just the last 9 months or so, there have been more than
150 cases of bovine theft in California's cattle-rich San
Joaquin Valley. According to sources in the Merced County
Sheriff's office, a new generation of high-tech rustlers is
swiping dairy calves and heifers to sell on the black
market. Why only immature milking cows? Because they're
easier to handle and harder to track (dairy cattle are
unbranded), detectives maintain.
Of course, the Associated Press attributes this resurgence
in a formerly obsolete crime to the Atkins diet (anything to demonize meat-eaters). Whether that's true or not is
irrelevant.
Crimes - theft, murder, embezzlement, fraud, whatever - are
only committed when people AREN'T AFRAID OF THE PENALTIES.
The cure for all crime is the same: Make the punishment
severe enough, and you'll deter the crime. That's why cattle rustling all but disappeared from the American landscape - the risk (being hung from the nearest tree) was just too great for the calf or two to be gained. Today, I'm sure the sentence for swiping steers would be more like a slap on the wrist than a quick-and-dirty hanging. But I digress...
The bottom line is this: I'm all for going "back in time" to an era where we ate nothing but meat, eggs, and potatoes and were glad (and healthier) for it. But I hope we don't
regress to the point where we're literally "rustling" up our grub - or buying black market meat. No matter how high the price of beef soars, it'll always be a bargain at twice the price.
The REAL crime would be to not eat it at all. :big_smile:
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If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything....
bb1fit@freetrainers.com
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