We promise not to call James McWilliams a mendacious manipulator. He is, of course, but as is his fashion, we will drop that “fact” casually and then tell you that, no, dear reader, we won’t bring it up, because that is a subject for another discussion.

If you haven’t read his convoluted and wholly misguided essay in The Atlantic, “Meat: What Big Agriculture and the Ethical Butcher Have in Common,” take a moment to try to make sense of it.

McWilliams tips his hand by telling you what he won’t talk about, when he introduces The Ethical Butcher: “The Ethical Butcher (a concept I find absurd, but that’s for another post), is a blog run by a guy named Berlin Reed,” he writes.

The best explanation we can come up with is that Mr. McWilliams seems to have vegan Tourettes.

Now, Mr. McWilliams starts his muddled Atlantic essay with the premise that “supporting alternatives to the industrial production of animal products serves the ultimate interest of industrial producers.” And how does he support this thesis? Well, because eating meat is ethically wrong in his worldview. Also, consuming milk, eggs and dairy is wrong.

And, according to McWilliams, those who consume animal products are “providing, however implicitly, an endorsement of the products that big agriculture will always be able to produce more efficiently and cheaply.” Ok, fair enough. But, if they are doing so — providing an “endorsement” of animal products, whatever that means — while loudly proclaiming the problems with Big Ag and factory farming, how is it they are supporting it? By eating meat. And that’s basically where his argument begins and ends.

Then he brings poor Berlin Reed into his argument, muddying The Ethical Butcher by claiming Reed’s message has been appropriated by The CCF (The Center for Consumer Freedom) — widely regarded as an advocacy group backed by, or at least founded by, restaurant, alcohol and tobacco industry lobbyists. McWilliams writes:

But now it’s the CCF — inspired by the ethical butcher’s staunch advocacy of meat consumption — that’s doing the calling, highlighting his website as consistent with CCF’s industrial values.

Go ahead click on the link he embedded there (we have no idea what he means by “That’s doing the calling,” by the way). It’s a blogroll.

On The CCF website there is nothing but a bunch of libertarian jargon about individual responsibility, and seemingly no appropriated language supporting sustainable farming (though if by appropriation you mean emulation, we could handle that). How does McWilliams equate the CCF’s listing of The Ethical Butcher on its blogroll with an appropriation of Berlin Reed’s message?

Just for kicks and because McWilliams didn’t, we called the CCF to ask them why they put The Ethical Butcher on the blogroll for Humanewatch. Justin Wilson, the research director and spokesman laughed, and said for the same reasons anyone anywhere does it: because it was something they saw and thought was interesting. There’s no implicit endorsement in either direction (but then, we’ve seen that McWilliams has an odd definition of endorsement), and the only time the CCF has mentioned The Ethical Butcher other than the blogroll listing is a brief mention when the blog launched in 2009. Wilson says he’s never had any contact with Reed. He did point out, though, that “We’ve cited McWilliams more than we’ve ever cited The Ethical Butcher.”

And herein likely lies the root of McWilliams anger. In fact, the CCF frequently cites McWilliams’ misguided arguments against locavorism and organics in support of its own equally misguided arguments. McWilliams is an associate professor of history at Texas State University, San Marcos and the author of Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, a tome from which The CCF seems to love to quote. The fact that his own words could be used so often to support an organization that is the antithesis of his vegan wonderland surely raised his ire. So apparently, he tried (badly) to do it to someone else, smearing Berlin Reed because the loathsome CCF had included his blog in its blogroll.

The only thing The Ethical Butcher and the CCF have in common, as the title of McWilliam’s essay proclaims, is “meat.” So is that enough to say one supports the other without citing anything more than a blogroll listing?

But where is the danger? Well, McWilliams has a theory.

He writes, “Right now industry is merely stealing words, concepts, and websites,” though he provides no evidence of any of this aside from the aforementioned blogroll listing, which of course is none of these things. But if the work of organizations such as The Butcher’s Guild, Cochon 555 and The Slow Foods USA has its desired affect and consumers do move toward locally grown and sustainable sources of meats, well, that is what terrifies McWilliams. Why? Because, in his words “what’s to stop industrial agriculture from building a few token sustainable farms where the animals are pastured, pampered, and publicized?”

So that is his big fear. That agribusiness adopt the methods of sustainable farms in a superficial way. His proof is that Big Agg will hollowly appropriate a well-intentioned message is the fact that The CCF, a fringe organization perhaps backed by restaurant industry money, put The Ethical Butcher on its blogroll.

Putting aside his cynicism about whether meaningful systemic change to our food supply is possible, the disaster, in his eyes, would be if people had more choices of sustainably raised meat.

Why? Because people would still be eating meat.

His logic is hard to argue with, but that’s for another post.

In case you haven’t heard, there’s an outfit out to help all you bored graphic designers out of your doldrums. Bacon Ipsum, so called, allows you to replace your tired old lorem ipsum dummy copy with, as they put it, something meatier. We decided to give it a whirl and mocked up a version of The Vegetarian Times using the Bacon Ipsum generator (childish, sure, but fun):

Anthony Bourdain’s fear — well, not so much a fear as something he feels has probably come to pass — is becoming the Tony Bourdain wind-up meat puppet: pull the string and watch him say something sarcastic/nasty/witty/biting/endearingly outlandish.

When he appeared at Barnes & Noble in Manhattan’s Union Square Tuesday to celebrate the release of his latest tome of put downs, musings, humor and rage, “Medium Raw,” fittingly, Bourdain read a passage about his waning anger, introducing the reading by saying when he started writing he thought this would be his warm and fuzzy book. His rage has dissipated, and he’s worried about becoming “a long-running lounge act, the exasperatedly enraged food guy. ‘Rachel Ray? What’s up with that?’ (Cue snare drum here.)  To a great extent that’s already happened.” To wit, on one occasion he received a fruit basket from Ray.

But obviously Bourdain didn’t write a gentle light-hearted book that gives blow jobs to all his past targets. No, there is one old foe he still has genuine contempt for, and that foe comes in many guises, from Jonathan Safran Foer to Sire Paul McCartney. “Okay,” he read, “I am genuinely angry — still — at vegetarians. That’s not shtick.”

But it is shtick to a degree, albeit shtick backed up by pages upon pages of lucid explanation. And the crowd — the massive seething crowd — ate it up. They filled the entire top floor of the Barnes & Noble, panting, yelling, frothing at the mouth and swooning over Mr. Bourdain: a TV food personality who made his name lambasting TV food personalities. Of course, to the cult of Bourdain he is much more than that. More than the guy who founded meat palace Les Halles, the closest thing New York has to a classic Parisian bistro. More than an acerbic curmudgeon. More than a chef without an apron. More than a former addict. More than a New York Times best selling author, who in addition to writing the memoirs he’s known for, is also pioneering a new genre of fiction: the food crime mystery. More than a cartoon amalgam of angry man parts. More than a raised eyebrow and a smirk. More than the sum of self-satisfaction and self-loathing.

And they love him for it. All of it. He’s got groupies galore. You half expected them to start flinging bras and panties on the stage. In fact, some are so amorous that his martial-arts trained wife has learned to lean in and tell them things like “Back off or I’ll smash your fucking face,” Bourdain writes in his book.

The staff at B&N gamely tried to keep the crowd in check, though it seemed a Sisyphean task, and during the Q&A they assembled two or three separate lines of people eager to get their books signed. The lines snaked around the room in Medusa tangles. Many of the assembled masses seemed more anxious to get the book signed than actually listening to its author speak. For example, three young ladies, even as they pushed and shoved their way onto a book-signing line, seemed incapable of shutting the fuck up for three seconds so that they or anyone around them could hear the answers to the questions asked of the illustrious author whose bones they kept talking about jumping.

Bourdain entertained questions genially and at length, though the unruly crowd tended to shout things at the stage that weren’t really questions, but more like demands for recitations. Yelling “HOW TO GRILL A STEAK” at the top of your lungs from the back of a bookstore (mind you from a distance of at least 100 yards) at Anthony Bourdain  is along the lines of screaming “PLAY FREEBIRD” at a Skynyrd concert at a county fair in Des Moines.

To his credit Bourdain just laughed and mused “Is that a question?” Though later on when someone asked (politely and with the aid of a microphone) how Bourdain makes a hamburger he dutifully obliged. (The answer, in a nutshell: one leg at a time.)

When Bourdain was asked about the true identity of Ruth Bordain, a Twitter mashup of somebody’s idea of a cross between him and Ruth Reichl, Bourdain said he’s got some idea of who he or she might be — some suspects — but that he thinks it’s hilarious and he hopes the tweeter, who has been going strong since March and has more than 8,000 followers, goes on forever.

“I’ve been a parody of myself for so long, it’s good to have an official parody,” Bourdain quipped.

He joked that he could end up with some sort of two part William Shatner career, where he spends the second half making fun of the first half.

During the grueling book-signing portion of the even-tempered Bourdain remained affable tapping his cowboy boots along to the Stones “Exile on Main Street” (which played through twice in its entirety). He played the rogue at times, as the bookstore staff went through the motions of hiding-but-not-hiding the Brooklyn Lager they filled his mug with (which explains the smile). He seemed like nothing so much as a politician, shaking hands, smiling for all the pictures, and, yes, even cooing at and kissing babies.

Sign. Smile. Repeat. This is what becomes a man who maybe was driven by some demons once. Who drank snorted, sniffed and smoked his way into a caricature. Who now has eased into himself and is a aging gracefully.

“It’s Sandra Lee’s world. It’s Rachel [Ray's] world. Me? You? We’re just living in it,” Bourdain writes in the new book. It’s a good line, but he’s wrong. It’s Tony’s world.  Sandra and Rachel? Well, they’re renting with an option to buy.

“Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to confining, killing, and eating it?” –JSF

“I am going to write poem

about Jonathan Safran Foer,” he declared.

“I’m not going to like it,” she said,

then laughed in spite of herself, because

he’d made a reference to a part of JSF’s anatomy.

But she wasn’t actually laughing at that.

She had thought of something silly and domestic she had done earlier, like maybe she had picked up the wrong toothbrush or tried to use her flatiron before plugging it in.

But the Safran Foer poem did not amuse her,

how he started slowly at first,

putting French string beans up there,

but the limp ones tended to bend and break apart.

Then he got more bold,

experimenting at first with sugar snap peas then carrots,

before moving on to cucumbers.

Boldness grabbed hold, and he worked an entire zucchini in,

and clenching it, he eyed the summer squash, lustily.

“When I accepted my New York Public Library Young Lion, I had three turnips and a large leek secreted away,” JSF confessed. Then he added, “There on the steps beside Bryant Park, those leafy vestiges poked out and tickled my skin.”

But he never felt satisfied,

always left wanting more,

insatiable, hungry,

empty.

Chef Erik Blauberg is the restaurant fixer. Like the Wolf in Pulp Fiction, he comes in (right into the kitchen — “I’m not in an office all day. I’m in the trenches,” he told the Daily News in 2008) when things fall apart. For a restaurant, that means empty tables.

Blauberg, who was formerly the executive chef at Manhattan’s 21 Club, has one strategy (besides “streamlining” the staff, which would shock no one) that might surprise: veganism. He adds vegan and vegetarian items to a menu based on the assumption that there are so-so-called Veto Vegetarians out there. When a vegetarian is eating out with us carnivores, goes the theory, the group will not eat at a restaurant that doesn’t offer meatless, (and, yes, even vegan options), costing the restaurant the business of the entire party.

Blauberg tells Plate magazine, in the June edition, about two long-running New York City restaurants he was recently charged with resuscitating. “If you put a vegan item on the menu,” Blauberg told Plate, “It will outsell a regular item.”

Now, while we’re not quite sure we’d follow that as a universal truth, Blauberg reports that at one of the restaurants, “We launched the new menu, and the first night we sold 60 or 70 vegan options.”

And at the other buckling boite, Blauberg advised putting a vegan burger on the menu to complement the Kobe burger. “Most of the time the vegan burger outsells the Kobe burger,” Blauberg says. “They sell 100 to 150 vegan burgers a night. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Of course, one reason might be that his vegan burger has a menu price of $15. Now, we’re not sure what the Kobe burger costs at the place because restaurants who call in Blauberg don’t exactly advertise that they needed the Wolf, but rest assured it probably ain’t $15 bucks. We have Side Dish investigating and will report back when we uncover this mystery omnivore’s delight.

And for the record: Give us a nice ground chuck and we are fine.

This week marks the 25th anniversary of the Smith’s seminal chart-topping album, “Meat is Murder,” which came out on Valentine’s Day in 1985. On the title track the famously vegetarian Morrisey bemoans the slaughtering of “beautiful creatures,” the fanciful frying of flesh, the joyful carving of calves and the festive slicing of holiday meat-treats. As for that farmstand bacon the Butcher had for breakfast on Sunday that “smelled just as good as it looked? “Kitchen aromas aren’t very homely /It’s not “comforting”, cheery or kind /It’s sizzling blood and the unholy stench of murder.”

But 1985 was a long time ago — back in the day of feed lots and slaughterhouses. Back when the average consumer thought of meat as something that arrived on the earth ground or cubed and wrapped in plastic. The original Times (UK) review of the album called “Meat is Murder” the Smiths’ “most disturbing song to date” and “enough to make anyone think twice as they survey the freezer cabinet in [the chain supermarket] Sainsbury’s.” But now we are educated, aware and compassionate. Are we still killers? Everywhere (okay, mainly in New York and San Francisco and possibly a few pockets in LA where they don’t drink human blood for fun) conscientious carnivores are answering Morrisey’s rhetorical question: “Do you know how animals die?” with a proud and resounding, “Yes We Do! (And we think this makes it okay to eat them!)”

We even give them names.

Would Morrisey feel any different if he knew the Butcher’s bacon had been purchased from the local farmer market and carved off the ass of a free range, grass fed, heritage swine from less than 100 miles away?

Not likely. Because he is not one of those faux vegetarians who, in the organic locavore whole-animal-utilization craze have found all the rationalization they need to dust off their steak knives. Or go wrist-deep in a gallon of pigs blood as the case may be. Morrissey would likely tell all those spareitarians, flexitarians and weekend tree huggers that anyway you choose to slice that happy heifer, it’s still murder.

Mike Joyce, the Smiths’ drummer, told the Times Online that it was this song (and not apparently Morrisey’s constant nagging) that finally pushed him into the herbivorism. “All Morrissey’s ‘You shouldn’t be eating that’ just washed over me, but the lyrics of the song just got to me. I’ve been a vegetarian ever since and so is my wife.” (Because, before the song, what? He thought that meat grew on trees?)

But even those who were so swayed by Morrissey’s bellowing “MURDER” have to chuckle a little bit at the heifer angst. Because we can all laugh at ourselves. Especially if we are Morrissey