An unforeseen twist to industrial agriculture, from the NYT:

By the reductive logic that rules our food system, cannibalism should be as legitimate a way of eating as any other: it’s all just protein, right? Yet the great unlearned lesson of B.S.E. and other similar brain-wasting diseases is that, at the level of species or ecosystems, it isn’t quite true that protein is protein. Eating the protein of your own species, for example, carries special risks. The Fore of New Guinea were nearly wiped out by kuru, which bears a striking resemblance to B.S.E.; they spread it among themselves by ritually eating the brains of their dead kin.

This Sunday’s Magazine also includes an article on the Farmer’s Diner in Barre, Vt. The December Harper’s carried a (better) article [not online] by Bill McKibben on the Farmer’s Diner and other peculiar Vermont ways of preserving local ways in the face of industrial logic.