Doggy Bag: 2009, the Year Meat Went Bad

sean dreilinger/Flickr

It was kind of like that.

Craven carnivores: Civil Eats posts Erik Marcus's look back at the year in meat, excerpted from Vegan.com. Markus's look back is generously marbled with snark, and it's not exactly a surprise that the meat industry comes out smelling like an industrial feedlot. Turns out the sour economy created a new generation of "recession-era vegetarians," with such calamitous results as cancellation of the national chicken recipe contest, the shuttering of Mickey D franchises (one became a pot dispensary), and the slaughter of more than 100,000 surplus cows. And the news of TV butter queen Paula Deen getting a ham facial (to quote a local blogger) wasn't the most painful story to come out of the pork industry in 2009.

Read the Marcus excerpt here. Depending on how you feel about animal flesh, it'll either validate your meatlessness or spur you to do your part by a flailing industry by filling your freezer with cutlets. Just saying.