This week’s fresh hell came via the Town Crier: Yahoo.com’s home page.  In the interest of cutting costs, meat inspectors in Indiana are scheduled to join the throngs collecting unemployment checks.  Anyone so moved to read the entire story may do so by backtracking it via Yahoo.  I feel compelled to add my two cents to this insane decision to cut jobs that directly impact human health and safety.

The duties accompanying the title “meat inspector” are broad and yet precise.  At their most basic, they concern audits of meat processing and meat packing plants.  But those facilities are not confined to producers of red meat.  Included in the “meat” category are chicken, duck, ostrich, pork, and whatever else human carnivores ingest that sport hooves or feathers.   Charged with ensuring that the plants are in full compliance with FDA regulations, inspectors monitor the entire meat-producing process, from receipt of the product to its butchering, packaging, storage/refrigeration, and shipment, including its movement throughout various areas of the plant.   In case you’re not keeping count, each one of those check points is a hot bed for disaster.  At best, disaster comes in the form of nasty digestive reactions; at worst, it spells death.

How on God’s good Earth are we to trust any packaged meat now in any supermarket?

Biblical scripture tells us that animals have been put here to serve us.  Most of us interpret that passage from The Book of Genesis thusly: that animals are here to be served to us.  Is death by meat our karma for having gobbled gobblers and other creatures since time immemorial?  Or does karma have nothing to do with, and our government, everything to do with it?  By firing the meat inspectors, is our government only doing what it does best?   Hint: screwing us out of our inalienable (God-given) right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, with the word “life” underscored, italicized, and blown up to 72- point type!

The appalling announcement about the soon-to-be state of our meat trotted in on the heels of me discovering, via Prevention magazine, that farmed salmon is not only detrimental to our health, it’s also so disgusting that if you knew the details, it would never pass your lips.  Guess how much farmed salmon has passed my lips in, oh, the last two decades?  An entire school, at least!

Preceding these fish and meat horrors, we had the stuffing scared out of us by way of bagged produce, readily available in any supermarket, claiming to have been “washed three times.”   I won’t tell you what happens to some of that allegedly sanitized produce; you’ll upchuck.  But I will tell you that at least several deaths have resulted from a lack of sanitation at the point of origin.  The same problem has been cited for eggs.  Thank God I’m neurotic, particularly when cooking.  I have always washed all of my fruits and veggies, including bananas and oranges and yup, eggs — even the organic ones — until they sparkle like new dimes.

So.  We can’t trust meat, fish, produce, or eggs.  What’s left to eat?  Wholesome products like Captain Crunch and Twinkies?  Rocks?

In the land of plenty, what is happening to our food supply?  What hath our government wrought?  The same government that jumps to protect us from terrors on foreign soil has no compunction about exposing us to certain death right here within our own borders.  What choices does it leave us?

Will we be reduced to eating that natural super food so chock-loaded with vitamins and minerals that by itself, it is capable of sustaining human life?  No, I’m not talking about the infamous VitaMeataVegamin; I’m talking about seaweed.   I’d rather starve and I mean that.  I’ve tried seaweed, and not just that black papery fishy-smelling stuff wrapped around sushi rolls.  I mean the slimy deep green and purple stuff that undulates in the sea, can be reconstituted immediately from its dried state, and will never slip easily down any sane person’s gullet.  I say this as I have tried putting it in salads as well as cooking it.  Will the starving millions eat seaweed rather than submit to lethal meat or other traditional food products?  And if we don’t eat it, will we indeed become the starving millions?

We’re all so concerned about the sickos in Iran and North Korea playing “mine is bigger than yours” with their nuclear weapons.  Maybe we should be more concerned with expiring from the stuff that passes our lips.  Maybe, in the end, we’ll have no choice whatsoever.   Maybe that’s how we’ll come to our collective end, not by an earthy cataclysm or a giant, otherworldly meteor.  Maybe the “logic” of a twisted government that bails out kings of industry with taxpayer billions, but gives law-abiding taxpayers the boot, will be the cause of our demise.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not eating seaweed.  Ever.  The end is at hand.  As per the anthem in that old R.E.M. sang, “It’s the end of the world as we know it … and I feel fine!”  Hungry, but fine.