Deluge & Deli Meat

Featured Articles

After the Deluge

Harper's Magazine • 19 Nov 2024 • ~7100 words • Archive Link

A small town faces down climate disaster.

For a moment, we had what they had: a communal purpose that draws us together—in their case, an angry God, in ours, angry weather—and leads us to put aside differences, or at least to surrender them to exigency. And in that same moment, I had something I hadn’t for the four years I’d led Scotland: a reservoir of goodwill on which to draw as I expressed views I’d mostly kept in check all along. I wrote it in my head, rehearsed it in my car: a sermon on the meaning of recent events, on floods and tornadoes as evidence of our sins.

The Case Against Deli Meat

Grub Street • 19 Nov 2024 • ~5200 words • Archive Link

They’re consistent, convenient, tasty — and at a time of recalls and outbreaks, one of the riskiest things you could eat.

But cold cuts represented a conceptual leap beyond their progenitors — more a simulation of meat than meat itself. Unlike classic deli meats, those plastic-wrapped blocks behind the deli counter do not all come from the same muscle or even a single animal. To make a typical loaf of cold cuts, many animals are slaughtered, exsanguinated, chilled, balded, cleaned, disassembled, deboned, tossed into a large industrial bowl, run through a set of high-speed rotating knives, ground into a pastelike goo the consistency of pancake batter, mixed with a cocktail of preservatives and binding agents, poured into molds that mimic the animal’s anatomy, cooked back into a solid, vacuum-sealed, and labeled for shipping.

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‘A little dirty’: inside the secret world of McKinsey, the firm hooked on fossil fuels

the Guardian • 20 Nov 2024 • ~3750 words

Interviews and analysis of court documents show how the world’s most prestigious consulting firm quietly helps fuel the climate crisis.

McKinsey goes where the money is, former consultants told the CCR. “It’s capitalism incarnate,” one said. Another, who says they petitioned senior figures at the firm to curb some of its more damaging fossil fuel work, said he was told: “If we don’t do it, a competitor will.”