Charlie: How do you like your steak?
Diane: Sitting in a pool of its own blood.
Diane and Charlie Levine were on their "fourth or fifth date" when this conversational snippet took place. On the couple's website yourmeattooth.com, it is noted that this "marks the moment they realized that they shared a special bond."
The site was launched in February 2010, and billed as "a joyous and juicy celebration of all things meat." The authors refer to themselves as "two regular people who want to talk to and hear from others with the same passion." "Regular people"? Well, sort of, and that's the problem.
"There's been this backlash against meat lately," says dopey Diane. "Between Meatless Mondays and some of the recent slams on the industry, meat really needs an advocate. And who better than us?"
Yeah, we need a meat advocate because everyone knows that Americans don't eat enough of the stuff.
There are countless studies that show the ill effects of a beef-laden diet, including one taken last year, involving half a million people over a decade's time, that was published in Archives of Internal Medicine:
I'll spare you a rundown of the dismal environmental consequences of mass carnivorousness, as well as the price that the animals pay. Should meat be part of a diet? That's up to each individual. But to mock Meatless Mondays, the aim of which is to simply encourage carnivores to moderate intake, is just not the direction we should be going. I realize that this meat-tooth blog isn't meant to be taken seriously, and nobody is being harmed by Diane and Charlie's desire to exist in a community of like-minded meat-headed people. But the new century is well under way, and it's getting time we start approaching the manner in which we eat in a more enlightened, less gluttonous, meatist manner. To say that the planet depends on it isn't an exaggeration. A good first step would be to stop this trend of glorifying monstrously unhealthy diets and foods -- and I'm speaking here not just about our mildly annoying steak-lusty couple, but of everything from KFC's Double Down to those crass Food Network shows to...well, there are lots of examples."People who eat red meat every day have a higher risk of dying over a 10-year period -- mostly because of cardiovascular disease or cancer -- than their peers who eat less red or processed meat...People who ate the most red meat had about a 30 percent greater risk of dying than those who ate the least...The researchers estimate that 11 percent of deaths in men and 16 percent of deaths in women during the study could have been prevented by reducing consumption of red meat."
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get off the podium and finish my Grape Nuts.
