Thought For Food.

Hey, here's an amusing factoid: Do you know where the flu comes from? Why, your favorite breakfast food providers, pigs and chickens. (As a bonus, we get whooping cough from the little piggies, too.)

Meanwhile, the burger you're having for lunch is indirectly responsible for measles, tuberculosis and smallpox. Yes, they're all bovine diseases that leapt from cows to humans. This is actually a pretty rare event but it will happen when large populations of animals are in close proximity to large populations of humans. Chinese chicken producers, in particular, have pretty sloppy animal husbandry habits and that's why you need a flu shot every year.

This all means two things:

(1) If mankind had stuck to a strictly plant-based diet we'd all be a lot healthier right now, and...

(2) As long as we continue to eat processed meats in the quantities that we do more deadly plagues are as a certainty.

The first European visitors to the Americas wrought all manner of these various plagues on the native Americans, and they alone are estimated to have killed 90% of the pre-Columbus Indian population. Does anyone think we'll fare much better when some new pathogen goes "Boo!" right in the middle of lunch?

Yes, the Center for Disease Control is looking out for us, keeping tabs on such possible epidemics but, and here's the good part, the Republican Congress has cut the CDC's funding by almost a billion dollars since 2010, from $6.5 billion dollars to $5.8 billion.

Happy Thanksgiving.

=Lefty=