Stop the Idiocracy: Food

Showing posts with label Food. Show all posts

Thursday, September 17, 2026

The two-dollar beef mirage

A richly rendered pin-up-style illustration depicts a glamorous blonde farm woman standing amid grazing cattle beneath turbulent storm clouds and golden evening light. Wearing a knotted red-and-white gingham blouse, abbreviated denim shorts, sheer stockings and brown cowboy boots, she gestures towards an old-fashioned balance scale upon a rough wooden counter. One pan bears a paper-wrapped parcel beside exposed ground beef, while the other overflows with coins and jewellery, symbolising its formidable cost. A weathered red barn and silo dominate the pastoral background, reinforcing the ironic contrast between agricultural abundance and expensive beef.

image generated via Gemini

GOP congressman, either grievously misinformed or gaslighting the public, asserts that ground beef is less than $2.00 a pound. {Huffington Post 16 September}

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/general/ar-AA2cnrRE

Actually closer to $7.00, and it hath been well-nigh a quarter of a century since the national average hovered anywhere near $2.00; yet never suffer mere facts to intrude upon a pleasing narrative.

FTA: Rep. Tom Emmer needs to tell the rest of us where he gets his groceries.

The Minnesota Republican appeared Wednesday morning on Fox Business and declared that beef prices had dropped to a level that may have shocked some viewers.

“We still have work to do, there’s no question,” Emmer said, downplaying the recent spike in inflation. “But eggs are at pre-pandemic prices. Beef is at less than $2 a pound for ground beef.”

In reality, the price of ground beef has shot up to nearly $7 a pound and shows no signs of retreating. Prices have risen steadily since the pandemic, with recent increases driven in large part by a historically small domestic cattle herd.

Despite Emmer’s rosy take on the situation, it’s been roughly 23 years since ground beef cost less than $2 per pound on average, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

HuffPost reached out to Emmer’s office to see if he misspoke, and if not, whether he would share the name of his ground beef supplier. A spokesperson did not immediately respond Wednesday.

linktr.ee/arthurnewhook

🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Friday, September 11, 2026

Where the waters turned

A richly detailed contemporary illustration depicts a red-haired woman with loose pigtails kneeling amid an immense sunlit lettuce field. Wearing a knotted white shirt, abbreviated denim shorts, stockings, work gloves and muddy boots, she examines an enormous head of iceberg lettuce with a troubled expression. Irrigation channels snake unnaturally through regimented crops towards distant mountains, while pipes discharge water directly into the fields. Dew beads heavily across the leaves. In the foreground, a magnified droplet contains a brilliantly coloured microscopic organism, while contaminated-looking water seeps visibly through exposed soil and roots, transforming an idyllic agricultural landscape into an unsettling visual metaphor for parasitic food contamination.

image generated via ChatGPT

FDA declares cyclospora outbreak ‘over’, though its exact origin remaineth unknown. {AP 11 September}

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/article/us-officials-declare-an-end-to-record-setting-cyclospora-outbreak-but-its-origin-is-still-unknown/

Yet another particularly sordid chapter in the ongoing and deliberate collapse of food safety standards in Trumpistan. Worse is to come —

FTA: The largest cyclospora food poisoning outbreak in U.S. history is over, U.S. health officials said Friday.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials said they are confident that all recalled iceberg lettuce related to this specific outbreak is off the market.

Nearly 13,000 reported cyclospora cases were tied to the multistate outbreak, federal officials say. They represent the bulk of an unprecedented surge in the parasitic diarrheal illness this year.

Even with the outbreak deemed over, several questions remain, including about its origin. The parasite is spread through human feces, and it still isn’t clear how sewage could have contaminated enough food to sicken so many people.

“This contamination can happen if produce is grown in soil or comes into contact with water that has been contaminated,” said Ellen Shumaker, director of outreach for a North Carolina State University food safety program, Safe Plates.

Since May 1, the government has received reports of nearly 20,000 lab-confirmed cases, or more than 16 times the number reported during the same period last year. More than 6,100 suspected cases also have been reported.

The worst previous year in the U.S. for infections was 2019, when about 4,700 illnesses were reported nationally.

This year’s surge in cases was dominated by an outbreak in 21 states linked to iceberg lettuce. But there are thousands of other cases that have not been linked to that outbreak.

linktr.ee/arthurnewhook

🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

The supermarket panopticon

A contemporary editorial illustration depicts a solitary young woman standing barefoot in the centre of an immense, eerily deserted supermarket aisle. She wears a luminous ivory slip dress beneath a dark coat trailing across the polished floor, while tears stream down her face as she gazes upwards with an anxious, overwhelmed expression. Endless shelves of brightly coloured, anonymous products converge behind her beneath harsh fluorescent lighting. Glowing electronic shelf labels line both sides, surveillance cameras watch from overhead, and abandoned trolleys and baskets punctuate the aisle. The mirror-like floor repeatedly reflects fragments of the woman’s distressed face, intensifying the atmosphere of isolation, surveillance and psychological unease.

image generated via ChatGPT

AFL-CIO: electronic shelf labeling to cut grocery jobs, raise prices, even violate shoppers' privacy and basic liberties. {The Guardian 9 September}

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/09/electronic-shelf-labels-grocery

Shady, and after a fashion Orwellian. As with the proliferation of data centres, there hath arisen some pushback in certain quarters; yet, upon the whole, we have rushed headlong towards a technological hellscape for which human beings remain by nature grievously ill-equipped, and I regard this development as a significant escalation of that broader and ever more pervasive tendency. —

FTA: The universal adoption of electronic shelf labels in grocery stores across the US could cost tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in lost wages while further driving up grocery costs, according to a report released on Tuesday.

An analysis by the AFL-CIO Tech Institute of the label manufacturers’ own marketing materials found the universal adoption of electronic shelf labels, which are marketed to retailers as a cost-cutting measure, could cost workers between $1.6bn and $6.9bn in lost wages annually and affect between 44,223 and 191,633 jobs.

The policy brief – Priced Out, Pushed Out: Electronic Shelf Labels Raise Prices and Shrink Paychecks – calls for a ban on electronic labels to protect consumers and workers.

Manufacturers have hailed the labels as a way to collect huge amounts of personal data from customers, increase profits and cut labor costs.

The report argues that electronic shelf labels use the same pricing systems that allow dynamic pricing – price changes such as increasing allergy medication prices when pollen counts are high – to surveillance pricing, changing prices based on personal data.

These technologies are being implemented across the US retail industry at a time when food prices have surpassed inflation and wage gains, increasing 33% over the past seven years.

“Through our analysis, we found that the implementation of electronic shelf labels are likely going to drive prices even higher. The reason being that these labels are connected to the same algorithmic pricing software that online retailers are already using,” said Sunny Glottmann, policy and programs managers at the AFL-CIO Tech Institute and co-author of the report.

“Electronic shelf labels create the infrastructure that would make rapid algorithmic price changes easier to implement at scale, and this raises concerns for consumers that are already struggling with grocery costs.”

The report comes as several states have begun introducing legislation to ban surveillance pricing and electronic shelf labels. In April, Maryland became the first state in the US to ban surveillance pricing. Connecticut signed a ban into law in June and New Jersey signed a ban into law in July.

linktr.ee/arthurnewhook

🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Monday, September 7, 2026

A harvest of distrust

A darkly whimsical Gothic illustration depicts a cavernous, deteriorating supermarket overwhelmed by disorder. Shelves and refrigerated cases remain crowded with groceries, yet packages, vegetables and containers spill across the tiled floor and tumble inexplicably from above through a sagging net. Numerous scantily clad women wander the aisles in visible distress, inspecting food, crouching beside overturned baskets or clutching groceries uncertainly. At centre, an enormous chaotic mound of discarded provisions rises beneath ominous red lights. Frayed wiring, broken fixtures, scattered receipts and neglected produce transform an ordinary grocery shop into a nightmarish emblem of a food system in collapse, where abundance coexists with contamination, waste and insecurity.

image generated via Seedream

Food safety unravels apace as recalls and inflation mount in tandem, leaving Americans burdened with pricier, toxic provender. {Axios 7 September}

https://www.axios.com/2026/09/07/food-safety-concerns-grocery-inflation

From leader of the world unto shame of all the earth. Fewer inspections, laxer regulations, watchdogs muzzled or turned away entirely, and the ravishing effects of climate change have wrought sufficient ruin that it is, in essence, no longer safe to eat within these former United States. We may debate until our faces wax blue the relative safety and nutritional value of American victuals prior to the nihilistic, nation-slaying Trump 2.0 regime — set against those of other Western nations — yet hither have we come, and here now do we stand.

What y’all voted for, #Murica —

FTA: Plenty of Americans feel like they're forking over a fortune for groceries—only to get hit with a recall notice that forces them to throw that expensive food out.

Why it matters: While grocery prices are driven by complex trade and energy costs, the safety net meant to keep them safe to eat is fraying, creating a dual crisis of affordability and safety.

The average American household pays more than $10,000 on groceries every year, and two-thirds of Americans think they're spending too much.

Prices have increased by more than 18% since 2022, although some foods have seen sharper or smaller increases.

What they're saying: "It can be really, really scary out there," Lauren Borsheim, a food policy analyst at Food & Water Watch, tells Axios.

"The Trump administration since 2025 has really just dismantled many of the fundamental protections we need to keep our food supply safe."

"We have people that are really afraid that the U.S. is not doing a good job regulating our food supply. It's definitely a concern out there that as people are spending more money on their food, they are also fearful that that same food is going to cause them to get sick," Borsheim says.

By the numbers: Recalls are relatively on par with normal levels this fiscal year, according to FDA data.

So far, 5,504 products have been recalled in 2026. That's up slightly from the 5,461 products recalled last year, but down from the 6,524 products recalled in 2024.

linktr.ee/arthurnewhook

🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

Mystery meat, imported on faith

A richly symbolic fantasy illustration personifies the United States as a blonde Lady Liberty presiding over an extravagant banquet of steaks, burgers and sausages. Wearing her familiar spiked crown and a flowing sea-green gown, she raises a flaming platter above the feast. Beneath the table, scales weigh raw beef against a hamburger, whilst crates of meat and an hourglass suggest scarcity and rising prices. Beyond, parched ranchland and dwindling cattle herds contrast with an industrial coastline, as glowing trade routes encircle the globe. The lavish foreground is deliberately ironic, representing America’s enormous appetite for beef confronting cattle shortages, constrained domestic production and increasing dependence upon foreign supplies.

image generated via Grok

US Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins refuses to say where proposed beef imports would be originating; ranchers are furious. {The Independent 25 August}

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-beef-imports-brooke-rollins-b3039094.html

As if much of the food we consume in this country were not toxic enough… Every American ought to feel a profound sense of revulsion, and be even more disgusted still by this regime’s steadfast refusal to disclose the provenance of this miraculous ground beef. In all seriousness, there are occasions of late upon which I find myself thinking I should never wish to eat again. Transparency ought to constitute the bare minimum where the nation's food supply is concerned, but who and what can be trusted these days? —

FTA: Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has refused to say which countries the Trump administration is relying on for its plan to temporarily surge beef imports into the U.S. to ease consumer prices.

“I am not privy to talk about that,” Rollins told reporters on Tuesday. “I think the conversations are still going on,” she added, saying that President Trump and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer were involved.

In a Truth Social post on Friday, President Trump claimed he had reached a deal to allow up to 300,000 metric tons of meat destined to become ground beef into the U.S. to be sold at reduced prices for the next 90 days without tariffs or quotas. The plan, Trump said, would “substantially lower the price of ground beef for working American families.”

A White House official told The Independent last week that Trump would “formally sign an executive order” to execute the agreement “within the next two weeks.”

Since Trump returned to office last year, the price of ground beef has risen from $5.45 per pound to $6.85 per pound, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

On Monday, an Arizona border crossing reopened to Mexican cattle, as fears have eased over the spread of the New World screwworm through Mexican cattle imports. The U.S. plans to open more border crossings as part of the beef plan.

The Trump administration’s beef deal has met with stiff resistance from ranchers and Republicans, who argue that allowing more imports will do little to change the underlying conditions that have sent beef prices spiking, such as low herd sizes because of drought.

"Despite high beef prices in grocery stores, prices paid to farmers and ranchers for their cattle have fallen sharply over the past two months, and beef packing plants are shutting down across the U.S.,” American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall said in a statement after the plan was announced.

"Further undercutting a fragile recovery by swamping markets with foreign products and attempting to manipulate prices threatens to wipe out any progress that has been made,” he added.

linktr.ee/arthurnewhook

🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Friday, August 21, 2026

The price of an empty pasture

A darkly whimsical illustration depicts the collapse of an American meatpacking industry beneath punishing heat and economic strain. A barefoot, red-haired woman in a tattered burgundy slip stands before a vast, rusting meatpacking plant whose machinery, pipes and towers twist into mournful human faces. She holds a nearly empty plate bearing only a tiny sprig of food. Beyond the shuttered factory stretches a parched, cracked landscape scattered with cattle, abandoned feeding troughs and fencing. At right, a skeletal cattle figure presides beside an ornate sign declaring beef an increasingly unaffordable luxury, while an almost grotesquely cheerful sun burns overhead. Cobwebbed controls, empty meat hooks, a discarded steak and an abandoned shopping trolley reinforce themes of plant closures, scarcity, rising beef prices and industrial decline.

image generated via ChatGPT

Will Tyson Foods’ shuttering of two US plants mean even greater pain at the grocery store in Trumpistan? {The Guardian 21 August}

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/aug/21/tyson-foods-close-facilities-beef-prices-cattle-shortage

Pray the experts have got this one right. Nobody hold their breath, though —

FTA: Tyson Foods, the largest meatpacking company in the US, announced last week that it is closing two of its facilities in Iowa and Utah and selling a beef facility in Washington state, and will lay off hundreds of workers as the supply of cattle hits a 75-year low.

The historic cattle shortage has been driven by a multi-year drought, rising costs and severe economic pressures, including consolidation among cattle ranchers. Beef prices have soared over the last year due to the shortage, though economists said the Tyson plant closures likely won’t hit consumer prices so hard.

Earlier this month, Tyson reported in its third-quarter earnings that beef volume is down 15.9% and beef operating loss is at $138m.

Glynn Tonsor, an agricultural economist at Kansas State University, said the US has had excess capacity for processing and packaging beef for several years now, and beef that would have been processed in Tyson’s Iowa and Utah plants will just be rerouted.

“For the majority of the last 40 years, nationally, the US has had more capacity to harvest cattle than we’ve had cattle,” he said. “Anytime you have too much capacity, or ‘too much’ supply relative to what is needed in the market, that puts downward pressure on the margins in that sector. That’s not new.”

With not enough cattle to harvest, meatpacking plants have been taking measures to slow down operations, including reducing shifts or cutting Saturday workdays. If operations don’t pick up, plants eventually close.

But these closures won’t change the amount of beef that is packed and processed, since the country has enough infrastructure to take on the current supply, experts said. While it may slightly increase transportation costs for the cattle producers who are located close to the shuttered Tyson plants, it is not likely to affect the price of beef overall.

linktr.ee/arthurnewhook

🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Friday, August 14, 2026

The cost of complacency

A richly detailed allegorical illustration depicts the vast international system behind American food safety. A blonde female inspector stands at a crossroads amid sprawling farms, greenhouses, livestock facilities and distant factories, carrying a metal case and clipboard as other inspectors disperse across the landscape. In the foreground, luggage, laboratory supplies, a biohazard-marked case, cargo ship, aircraft and globe evoke the immense scale of foreign imports and inspection duties. At right, another woman scrutinises packaged produce beside a magnified display of microorganisms, linking agricultural commerce with the persistent danger of food-borne contamination.

image generated via ChatGPT

The FDA, failing the nation, conducted fewer than one-twentieth of the foreign inspections required by law over the past decade. {CBS News 12 August}

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/taylor-farms-mexico-fda-inspection-cyclosporiasis-outbreak/

Predictably, the farm in Mexico linked to the ongoing cyclospora outbreak had not been inspected since 2019. Do not expect any improvement any time soon — only further deterioration.

FTA: The Food and Drug Administration conducted just under 1,000 foreign food safety inspections in 2025, and the farm in Mexico believed to be at the center of the ongoing cyclosporiasis outbreak in the U.S. was not one of them.

A federal law enacted to prevent diseased and dirty food from reaching Americans' plates requires the FDA to carry out nearly 20 times that many foreign inspections each year. But the FDA hasn't come close to meeting the congressional mandate — or even 10% of it — in the 10 years it has been in place, spanning administrations led by both political parties.

FDA officials have described the requirement as unrealistic, but have never asked Congress to revise it. A lower foreign inspection target the agency deemed necessary to safeguard foreign imports is still nearly five times higher than the number of inspections conducted last year.

Congress, meanwhile, has not increased the agency's food safety budget to outpace or keep up with inflation, and widespread layoffs during the first year of President Trump's second term squeezed resources further.

The rate of inspections has gotten markedly worse amid those reductions, with foreign food safety inspections falling by 29% from 2024. Outside of the COVID-19 pandemic, last year's inspection count was the lowest since 2011. Early numbers for 2026 show that the agency is on track to inspect a similar number this year.

linktr.ee/arthurnewhook

🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

The silence after the siren: food and agriculture in retreat

A richly detailed editorial illustration depicts female workers leaving a vast American meat-processing complex at sunset. In the foreground, a blonde woman in a white work coat and boots carries gloves and a metal case, glancing back with a troubled expression. Around her, other women embrace, carry personal belongings or sit dejectedly after apparently losing their jobs. An open processing plant, forklifts and hanging carcasses appear behind them, while several enormous industrial facilities recede across a dry, sparsely vegetated landscape. The melancholy golden light reinforces themes of closure, economic hardship and uncertainty within American food production.

image generated via ChatGPT

Tyson Foods is to close or divest three facilities, as a historic cattle shortage lays waste to the US meatpacking industry. {Reuters 13 August}

https://www.agriculture.com/partners-tyson-foods-says-it-will-close-sell-three-sites-amid-u-s-cattle-shortage-12059640

This, alongside the Taylor Farms lettuce debacle and other food-safety concerns that have been in the news of late — compounded by natural disasters and a cattle shortage of the utmost severity — constitutes merely the visible tip of the iceberg (no pun intended) as to what is about to befall American agriculture and food production; all made worse under a regime hell-bent upon dismantling regulatory safeguards at any cost. Tyranny assumes many guises, among them increasingly unsafe food, water, and medicine.

I hate to keep saying it (but not really): what y’all voted for, #Murica.

FTA: Tyson on Aug. 3 warned that losses in its beef business would widen as tight cattle supplies keep livestock costs elevated. It forecast an adjusted operating loss of $500 million to $650 million in fiscal 2026 for its beef business, compared with a previous forecast for a $350 million to $500 million loss.

Cattle supplies shrank to a 75-year low after a prolonged drought burned up grazing lands in the western U.S. and Washington suspended imports from Mexico in an attempt to keep out the flesh-eating livestock pest New World screwworm.

However, screwworms were detected in June on Texas farms and in New Mexico after moving north through Central America.

Facing pressure to lower consumer costs, the Trump administration said it plans to start lifting the import ban this month. The average retail price of one pound of lean and extra lean ground beef hit a record $8.65 in June, according to federal data.

“We have paid the economic price of a closed border, disrupted a cattle supply chain built over generations and screwworm still made it into the United States,” said Texas’s Miller.

It may take up to a year for Tyson to benefit from removing the ban because imported feeder cattle must spend time grazing on grass or being fattened in feedlots to get ready for slaughter, Tyson Chief Operating Officer Wes Morris said on a conference call last week.

linktr.ee/arthurnewhook

🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Sunday, July 26, 2026

The hidden cost of fresh produce

A warmly lit, mid-century-inspired illustration depicts a red-haired woman standing barefoot in the doorway of a modest vintage kitchen. She wears an off-the-shoulder cream floral dress with pink roses, lifting one side of the skirt slightly as she faces the viewer with a composed but questioning expression. One hand rests beside a wooden bowl containing lettuce, tomatoes, and strawberries on the worktop, subtly drawing attention to the fresh produce. Sunlight streams through the open doorway and gingham-curtained window, illuminating a cream enamel refrigerator, an old-fashioned stove with a red cooking pot, and well-worn cupboards that evoke an ordinary domestic setting. The nostalgic décor and gentle golden light contrast with the sparse bowl of salad ingredients, suggesting concern over the safety or availability of fresh food while preserving an atmosphere of quiet domestic resilience.

An ornate Renaissance-style allegorical painting of a humanised Statue of Liberty as a wounded woman with a spiked crown, lying injured on an antique medical gurney—her leg in a brace, her chest bandaged. Four nurses in vintage uniforms tend to her: one checketh her face, another taketh notes, a third adjusteth her leg. Stone archways frame a parched cracked landscape on one side and a coastal scene with ships on the other. Above, a surreal sky holdeth Saturn, swirling clouds, and a cascade of falling produce—cabbages, tomatoes, bread, coffee beans. Candles, lanterns, and antique mechanical equipment surround the bed.

generated via ChatGPT

Everyday items grow costlier in the former United States, largely due to its nation-destroying president's policies and actions. {WP 10 June; image generated via ChatGPT}

https://wapo.st/4oh9zdz

Mother Nature hath done some damage – notably, of late, in the form of drought – and I believe America is simply cursed and is going to remain so long after the orange usurper hath either been deposed, by whatever means, or simply dies. As decrepit as the motherf**ker is, he is not going anywhere for a long time to come. Mark my words. He is a curse, we are cursed; we shall never know life as it once was again.

Far more suffering and misery is yet to come. A drought here, a failed harvest there, rivers either overflowing or running lower than expected, reservoirs shrinking beneath an unforgiving sun. Perchance, another global health crisis. To say nothing of the ongoing political and social crack-up, all exposing the fragility lurking beneath the modern world's no longer so confident façade. One can never rule out the possibility of some madman – Putin, Kim Jong Un, the Iranians, Trump – playing with nuclear weapons. Fun times, yeah?

The former United States – and I do not use that moniker to be cute, this is not the country I grew up in – is in the midst of a long historical season from which there is no easy escape. One that began with a literal bang on 11 September 2001, and America and her people have done almost nothing but make nearly every bad decision possible since then: the resentment, the distrust, the hunger for strongmen, the endless appetite for spectacle over substance. We are a nation in the midst of a gradual systemic breakdown.

By and large, the peasantry have themselves to blame for the hard times we are only beginning to endure in earnest, and I would be here for days enumerating the hows and whys. Fifty years from now, after we are long dead and buried and assuming the earth is still standing, the mass of humanity shall revert to living in caves because of the catastrophically awful, short-sighted, and malevolent direction the former United States of America hath taken over the decades, particularly in the past quarter-century. The America of my childhood and young adulthood, before 9/11, may have been a bit of a fraud in retrospect, and any nation will always have its warts even in the best of times; overall, though, it was undeniably a more decent and liveable place than this one. As one who hath lived through this transition from the world's strongest nation by a gazillion miles into one that is now bordering on third world status and is the black sheep of the global community, I am horrified thinking of all the ways we threw our collective prosperity, security, and dignity away. We will never know again what we once knew, and the younger generations coming up now and the generations yet to be born – again, if the earth is still standing – will simply never know, period.

Karma is a bitch, #Murica.

linktr.ee/arthurnewhook

🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Tuesday, June 9, 2026

A symphony for the open range

A detailed fantasy illustration of resilience, innovation, and agricultural stewardship in the modern American West. Foreground standeth a confident ranch-inspired woman with flowing dark hair, a cream cowboy hat, and a sleeveless denim outfit with an ornate Western belt. One hand extendeth toward the horizon; the other cradlet a cluster of glowing golden lights—knowledge, technology, hope. Behind stretcheth a Texas cattle landscape of herds, ranch roads, windmills, and mesas. Luminous pathways connect ranchers, livestock, vehicles, and field stations. Above, floating cities, celestial whirlpools, and a colossal ringed planet create a progressive-rock dreamscape. Warm gold, cream, and sapphire tones blend Western iconography with cosmic fantasy—determination, cooperation, and the safeguarding of rural livelihoods amid extraordinary trials.

generated via ChatGPT

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins claims US food supply not at risk after second case of screwworm infection confirmed in Texas. {CNBC 8 June}

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/08/texas-screwworm-cases-food-supply-brooke-rollins.html

In other words, be concerned. Very concerned. Blind faith in institutions ends rather badly when those institutions cease deserving it. Absolutely nothing emerging from this regime should be accepted uncritically. Nothing. Every announcement, every assurance, every triumphant declaration: all are lies.

As for agriculture, I suspect we have scarcely glimpsed the beginning of the story. Our way of life is utterly dependent upon a stable and productive food supply.

Civilisations rarely collapse because people suddenly forget how to govern. More often, they discover that governing becomes considerably more difficult once harvests fail, supply chains fracture, costs spiral, and confidence evaporates. Food is not merely another commodity. It is the foundation upon which every other political, economic, and social arrangement ultimately rests. The health of a nation's fields frequently tells one more about its future than the speeches delivered in its capitals.

I am not a religious zealot, yet I confess to observing events unfolding across the world and finding myself wondering whether humanity hath become rather too pleased with itself. We are in an age of astonishing technological achievement, yet one of extraordinary arrogance. We often – too many of us, at least – behave as though every natural law has been conquered, every consequence postponed, every warning rendered obsolete. A society that ignores every warning because it finds those warnings inconvenient eventually discovers that reality is under no obligation to respect political narratives, ideological preferences, or comforting illusions.

linktr.ee/arthurnewhook

🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Saturday, June 6, 2026

Daisy and the last brisket in Texas

A detailed surrealist illustration blending mid-century pin-up with 1970s progressive-rock art. Foreground, a tearful blonde cowgirl beneath a cream hat, her curled hair lit by amber light. She weareth a fitted ivory corset top and frayed denim shorts—exhaustion, frustration, resilience. Behind stretcheth a Texas barbecue landscape of smokers, grills, cattle pens, and smoke. The sky erupteth into nebulae, Saturn, floating mesas, and impossible rock formations. Enormous cuts of smoked brisket and oversized grilling utensils drift through the heavens. Warm oranges, golds, violets, and smoky blues dominate. Distant cattle, smoke plumes, and glowing horizons speak of scarcity, labour, and cultural tradition under strain. Richly layered, theatrical, and emotionally charged.

generated via ChatGPT

Are we 'great' again yet? Texas BBQ joints close as beef prices soar amid 75-year low cattle supply and Iran war costs. {ABC News 5 June}

https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/food/story/texas-pitmasters-express-concern-amid-beef-shortages-rising-133612016

linktr.ee/arthurnewhook

🪐💔 #QueSeraSera 𓅨 🕈

Saturday, December 6, 2025

Trump insists he is ‘FIXING’ the affordability crisis, despite all available evidence indicating quite the opposite

A stylised, painterly illustration depicts a blonde young woman standing at a petrol station, rendered with the polished sheen of mid-century advertising art. She wears a bright red dress and a matching ‘Make America Great Again’ cap, her expression one of breezy, almost theatrical self-assurance. One arm cradles two paper bags of groceries; the other is lifted in a gesture of blithe resignation, as though commenting on the scene around her. Behind her, a large sign declaims ‘AN ARM AND A LEG — BIDEN’S FAULT’, while the price board advertises petrol at $2.95, the lettering bold and deliberately simplified. Red and blue pumps flank the composition, and a discarded fast-food wrapper lies on the forecourt. The image blends kitsch Americana with pointed political satire, transforming a quotidian errand into a tableau of populist grievance and glossy pin-up aesthetics.

image generated via ChatGPT

{The Hill 6 December} ‘Trump says Biden to blame for affordability crisis: “I’M FIXING IT”’

Such an egregious falsehood—one that anyone who has set foot in a grocery store or gas station knows to be demonstrably untrue—nonetheless passes unchallenged within his circle, for his supporters will dutifully echo any absurdity, however brazen, so long as it serves the puerile objective of ‘owning the libs’. Neither he nor they exhibit the slightest concern for the welfare of the broader citizenry.

Trumpism has long since metastasised into a Christian-nationalist, predominantly white supremacist movement, determined to subject the entirety of the American populace to its tyrannical will. If Trump declares that two plus two equals three, one is expected—indeed compelled—to affirm that it is three. That is the trajectory upon which the former republic now finds itself.

And the millions who cast their ballots for this orange demagogue are receiving exactly what they sought: the persecution and marginalisation of all who fall outside their narrow, exclusionary tribe.

“The grocery checkout line will now be a battleground where state officials control what millions of Americans on SNAP can buy… directly from a playbook written by white plantation owners in the South.” {Baptist News 25 November}

Employers in the former US have cut over 1.1 million jobs in 2025, 54% higher than 2024; tech sector haemorrhaging fastest. {CBS News 4 December}

Elon Musk in hiding, claims he is the most vulnerable in the former US for assassination behind his former partner-in-crime. {IBT 4 December}

Ex-British PM Liz Truss resurfaces as a YouTube grifter, her new series pitched in earnest to American right-wing populists. {The Guardian 5 December}

Thursday, November 6, 2025

Federal judge orders Trump to restore SNAP payments—futile in a lawless land where the nation ravenously consumes its own

A haunting allegorical painting depicting a pale young woman standing in a desolate urban street beneath a leaden sky. She holds a folded newspaper with the headline “Federal Judge Orders Trump to Fund SNAP Payments”, her expression subdued and sorrowful, embodying quiet endurance amidst social decay. Behind her, a derelict grocery store looms, its windows dim, while a billboard blazes with nationalist fervour—“AMERICA FIRST — STRONG AGAIN”—featuring the grinning visages of suited politicians. The contrast between her fragile humanity and the propagandistic spectacle underscores the tension between empathy and authoritarian indifference. The scene’s palette—muted ochres and ashen blues—conveys moral exhaustion, evoking a modern dystopia where hunger and political cynicism coexist. In the shadows, a homeless figure cradles a child, amplifying the painting’s elegiac meditation on neglect, inequality, and the collapse of civic compassion.

image generated via ChatGPT

{ABC News 6 November} Federal judge orders Trump to fully fund SNAP November payments by tomorrow, 7 November.

SPOILER ALERT: Trump shall not do so, and there is nobody stepping up to force him to comply. WARNING: these assaults on Medicaid and SNAP are mere probes of public apathy—Social Security shall be the next citadel besieged. Trump and his confederates are getting away with literal murder—met with mass approbation.

Do not prattle of polls to me: for about a decade, between forty and sixty per cent of Americans have consistently either cheered this tinpot-dictator on or have averted their gaze, whilst the Democratic Party remains the nation’s most reviled institution—particularly among men, the devout and superstitious, the rural, and above all those who bear arms. The Democrats have not secured a majority of the white vote in a presidential election since 1964. Democracy lies dead now—for the majority of Americans, as of humankind generally and eternally, elevate tribal loyalty above reason or principle.

Abandon all hope of repairing the former United States: the self-styled patriots have slain their country in the name of ‘saving’ it. The Democratic Party—and its voters—have for far too long busied themselves with pronouns, quotas, and assorted p.c. frivolities, yet possess not the slightest courage when it comes to confronting the true adversary: the white-trash American—most often rural, though found everywhere—who enables this criminal network of nation-destroying tyrants. And they would see the rest of us dead and gone. That is why all this unfolds—and that truth must be spoken plainly, the bloody feelings of white-trash be damned (none, after all, are more enslaved to their feelings than those who bellow “f**k your feelings”). —Arthur Newhook, 6 November 2025.

Thursday, October 23, 2025

The USDA has announced that SNAP benefits will not be issued in November—and yet there appears to be scarcely a murmur of public outrage

A young woman stands alone in a desolate supermarket aisle, her expression one of quiet resignation. Clad in a faded floral dress that evokes both modesty and bygone innocence, she grips the handle of an empty shopping trolley containing only a single tin can—an emblem of deprivation rendered almost sacramental by its isolation. The shelves around her are stripped bare, their voids echoing the collapse of civic plenty. Behind her, through the dim glass, silhouettes of the desperate press against the light, their raised hands spectral in the gloom. Overhead, a lurid electronic sign blares: “NO SNAP BENEFITS THIS MONTH — BLAME THE DEMOCRATS.” Its accusatory glow casts a sinister warmth upon the scene, a false illumination masking cruelty as policy. The image captures a society cannibalising its poor while peddling blame as bread—an elegy for dignity amid the theatre of economic despair.

image generated via ChatGPT

{WABI 21 October} ‘USDA announces SNAP benefits will not be issued in November’

One might have thought that the spectacle of a corrupt regime weaponising a government shutdown to advance its nation-killing, people-crushing agenda would rouse some degree of indignation. But no; the real outrage is reserved for matters such as who is performing at the bloody Super Bowl halftime show in #Murica. The cessation of SNAP benefits—however temporary, and let us not assume it will be—unfolds while the shelves of food banks stand perpetually bare, resonating only with the hollow silence of despair. This happens whilst an unrelenting war upon empathy itself is waged by that ever-so-valorous and manly anti-woke brigade.

And do not imagine that those Americans still able to feed themselves will rise in significant number to fill the breach. Quite the contrary: charitable giving is increasingly derided as a form of enabling—compassion itself now suspect—in this benighted dystopia that has supplanted the former United States. The nation’s ruling party—more accurately, a personality cult now—seems positively intent on waging economic warfare against its own citizens, including the very sheep that are their voter base who shall continue to worship the demagogic charlatan up to the moment of slaughter.

Perhaps I sound like a broken record, but I remain utterly flabbergasted by the speed and depth of the descent—how swiftly this nation, and indeed the wider world, are sinking into the infernal abyss. —Arthur Newhook, 23 October 2025.

Saturday, October 11, 2025

Trump’s immigration crackdown implodes: his own Labor Department concedes the crackdown drives food costs up, ruins farms

An illustration rendered in the tender, painterly idiom of mid-century Americana, suffused with melancholy and quiet dignity. A blonde young woman kneels in a sun-drenched pasture, her gloved hand pressed to trembling lips as she reads a foreclosure notice. A single tear traces her cheek, glinting against skin of porcelain pallor. Her cornflower-blue dress, dotted with white, and red neckerchief evoke a bygone innocence, yet the paper in her hand signals ruin. Behind her stands a weathered barn emblazoned DAIRY, its faded red timbers recalling years of honest labour, and a lone cow watches from the paddock as though bearing witness to the family’s downfall. The golden haze of evening softens the devastation, imbuing the scene with tragic pastoral beauty—a portrait of American despair caught between the romantic ideal of the heartland and the cruel arithmetic of economic failure.

image generated via ChatGPT

{WP 11 October} ‘Trump administration says immigration enforcement threatens higher food prices’

More of the poison you chose, then—the grand harvest of ignorance. The #MAGA faithful are now choking on their own nationalism, yet still too proud to admit the crop was sown by their own hand. Welcome to the Third World republic you built, bloody white trash:

The Trump administration said that its immigration crackdown is hurting farmers and risking higher food prices for Americans by cutting off agriculture’s labor supply.
The Labor Department warned in an obscure document filed with the Federal Register last week that “the near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens” is threatening “the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S. consumers.”
“Unless the Department acts immediately to provide a source of stable and lawful labor, this threat will grow,” with increased funding for immigration enforcement from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Labor Department said in the Federal Register, which is the place where all proposed rules are recorded for the public to view and comment.
Also, contradicting comments made by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins that the U.S. farm workforce will become “100 percent American” as a result of mass deportations, the Labor Department noted that Americans are not willing to step into farm work and lack the skills to fill agricultural jobs that undocumented immigrants are abandoning.

The article observes—quite rightly—that Trump’s only course of damage control is to pay off American farmers for the ruin his own policies have wrought. It is a trick he has played before, circa 2018, when his petty tariff war with China gutted the very markets he claimed to defend. Only now the stage is darker, the stakes higher, and the madman unrestrained from within. Tariffs and immigration chaos have fused into a perfect storm, and the harvest will be famine.

I keep saying it, though it falls on ears deafened by flags and slogans: ‘y’all’ made a catastrophic, history-sized blunder, and the bill is about to arrive. —Arthur Newhook, 11 October 2025.