The vision of $4- and $3- and even less than $2-a-pound meat, while surely still with us, could be on the decline. Wishful thinking. But at least bulk purchases are down. That’s according to a report from the American Meat Institute and the Food Marketing Institute released this week at the Annual Meat Conference in Dallas.

Funny that there is an actual event with the same name that we give our brother-in-law’s visits. But more important were some of the findings in the report, which asserted that yes, value-shopping for meat is still with us; consumers haven’t all of a sudden given up deal-hunting. But data shows that consumers may have finally begun to realize at long last that they don’t have to find dirt-cheap per-pound prices, they can just buy less at once and thereby save money.

Perhaps it’s the realization that they don’t need to make a Bacon Explosion every night and that sane portions will do (and their kids may even stop that creepy wheezing brought on by the extra pounds they are carrying). Perhaps word has gotten out to the flyover states that the cheaper meat the higher the incidence of animal cruelty and every time they looked at that “$1.99/lb” price tag what they saw was beakless chickens stuffed ten to a cage or cattle specked in their own shit on feed lots.

Alas, the report, dubbed “The Power of Meat” (cue Huey Lewis), doesn’t point to this conclusion. Price per pound is still the determining factor, according to the consumers polled. In fact, they actually want the price-per-pound to drop MORE. Per the report:

“Shoppers who say they are buying less spend nearly $14 less than the national weekly grocery bill average. For retailers, elimination of items rather than substitution is a dangerous development. Shoppers are also less interested in family packs and report that more substantial discounts are needed to prompt them to purchase in bulk.”

According to a report from American Express the wealthiest Americans are gorging on more processed meat patties than ever. What the company refers to as the “ultra-affluent” spent nearly 25 percent more on fast food than they had the year before. Am-Ex defines the “ultra-affluent” as those who charge more than $7,000 a month on their credit cards. What? Did you expect the credit card company to call its best customers “bourgeois climbers”?

Apparently most Americans think it’s fine to eat like a 19th century pirate. On Sunday, The New York Times reported  the following disturbing statistic: Less than 25 percent of the meals Americans eat includes a vegetable — any vegetable at all  (including lettuce on a hamburger).

Those adorable displays of $5/lb heirloom tomatoes at Dean and Deluca are great, but let’s face it: in many parts of the country, “salad” means chopped meat — either blended with mayonnaise and celery or piled on a leaf of limp lettuce and smothered with creamy dressing.

Shockingly, selling pre-bleached bags of romaine lettuce with waxy feta cheese and trying to convince children that carrots are junk food hasn’t worked either. What is the answer? Maybe the California burger.

Peta has been replaced as the most pusillanimous, ineffectual stunt activist group (especially after that elephant video): May we introduce you to a group calling itself the Cancer Project. Its target? Hot dogs.

CP filed a lawsuit in New Jersey against hot dog manufacturers Oscar Mayer, Sara Lee, Nathan’s Famous, Hebrew National and Sabrett. The only explanation must be that these people are emotionally stunted and this is a desperate plea fro attention. They obviously hate their fathers.

As evidence the CP cite the ingloriously fuck-you-studied study from the American Institute for Cancer Research that concluded regular consumption of processed meat can increase the risk of certain forms of cancer. They are asking for warning labels to s to be place don hot dogs like those that are affixed to boxes of cigarettes. They should all be force fed until they explode, along with the Påté Police.

Everyone who has ever run Pat LaFrieda Meats has been named Pat LaFrieda, it would seem. Smart Money’s Small Business went inside the warehouse to talk with Pat La Frieda III and his cousin Mark Pastore, who, between them, run the shop as a 24/7 operation. In the below video from the reporter, there are many, many nice shots of the youngest Pat La Frieda caressing dry-aged steaks, trimming fat from the choice cuts and slicing them on ban saws.

LaFrieda Meats has sales in the range of $40 to $45 million a year and slices, grinds, packages and delivers 300,000 pounds of meat a week. A week!

But what about that study making the rounds, the one that says people who eat more red meat are more likely to die? Could it hurt the empire? La Frieda has an answer, and yes, it amounts to fuck you, study. “Those studies are nothing new,” he says. “There are plenty of things out there that are far worse than red meat.”

Inside La Frieda’s meat locker

There was an Op-Ed in today’s New York Times written by a professor of history at  Texas State University — one James E. McWilliams. And damned if McWilliams isn’t a mouthpiece for agribusiness pork. But what do you expect coming from Texas State University? Also this guy wrote a book that is like the opposite of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” called  “Just Food: How Locavores Are Endangering the Future of Food and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly.” His thesis in the op-ed titled “Free-Range Trichinosis” is basically that free-range pork invites disease by allowing the pigs out into the outdoors that harbor all the dangers we brought the pigs inside to avoid. He even tries to combat the argument that heritage-bred free-range pigs taste better. But at least he does so with humor and flair, by relating advocates of the aforementioned to a certain particular breed of hunter in Texas:

It may be objectively true that animals living in a state of nature produce sweeter meat. There are hunters in East Texas who track wild hogs, slice off their testicles so the beasts will fatten and lose their gamy taste and then shoot them months later. These gentlemen swear by the superior flavor. Don’t count on me to challenge the taste assessments of people who thrive on such blood sport. If they say it’s better, it’s better.

Mr. McWilliams, let the Butcher be the first to say that you should have your testicles sliced off until you fatten and lose your gamey flavor.

Well, here is a newsflash: Eating red meat every day decreases your life expectancy. Thank you, doctors. A new study, which followed more than 500,000 middle-age and elderly people for 10 years, found that the meat eaters were 30 percent more likely to die over the course of the study. We have a reaction: They died happy. We also can’t help but marvel at the time and expense put into a study to tell people something they probably already knew and also probably don’t care about anyway. If you want to eat red meat, you are going to eat red meat. Or you can live a life of quiet desperation, picking at sprouts and hoping that you’ve earned a couple of extra years of hobbling around on your frail bones and shitting in your pants.

Then there is this asshole Barry M. Popkin, a professor of global nutrition at the University of North Carolina, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study. He said, “This is a slam-dunk to say that, ‘Yes, indeed, if people want to be healthy and live longer, consume less red and processed meat.’ ” Since when are processed meat and red meat the same fucking thing?

When reached for comment The American Meat Institute’s James H. Hodges said, basically, “Fuck you, study.”

OK. In all fairness. The study encourages eating more chicken and white meat (pork doesn’t count in their book—sorry Pork Council and SaskPork—but fish is good). Nonetheless, it’s still patently absurd. Eating quality red meat in moderation is part of a healthy diet

The methodology of the study, as reported by the Washington Post was thus:

For the study, researchers analyzed data from 545,653 predominantly white volunteers, ages 50 to 71, participating in the National Institutes of Health-AARP Diet and Health Study. In 1995, the subjects filled out detailed questionnaires about their diets, including meat consumption. Over the next 10 years, 47,976 men and 23,276 women died.

The eating habits of participants in the study were self-reported, and as such unreliable. How many of the 30 percent who died counted a Big Mac as red meat? Maybe the meat eaters were just more adventurous and engaged in more risky behavior in general — honestly, what sort of person doesn’t eat any red meat? — and that’s why they were more likely to die. Maybe older participants were more likely to eat meat. Also, if you are dumb enough to eat red meat every day, you deserve to die.