Peas, peeled

Take a month or so off the bitching beat and the faux outrages fly right past. Was pink slime really a 24/7 obsession? Dirty eggs and filthier chickens? Chickenshit in the meat aisle? Pink slime from tuna? Salmonella from tuna sushi? You can’t even keep up, and certainly there’s rarely any followup. But I see everyone is determined to beat the food-deserts issue to death on a daily basis — anything that proves the poors don’t have it so bad is front-page news, even though figures lie and liars figure. As my consort always rails, every article/op-ed quoting or written by someone at a think tank should carry prominent notice of which way it leans. (Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine? Hide your fur!) Reality may have a liberal bias, but no one figures like a wingnut. (I did catch just enough of the scandale over the bugs busted for coloring drinks at Starbucks, thanks to both Colbert and the Murdoch mouthpiece. No one had better alert vegans to the bugs in their chocolate, their flour and, especially, their raisins. . .)