The microbiologist who coined the term for lean finely textured beef ran through a few iterations in his head before pressing send on an email to a co-worker at the U.S. Department of Agriculture a decade ago. Then, the name hit him like heartburn after a juicy burger.

"It's pink. It's pasty. And it's slimy looking. So I called it pink slime," said Gerald Zirnstein, the former meat inspector at the USDA. "It resonates, doesn't it?"

The pithy description fueled an uproar that resulted in the main company behind the filler, Beef Products Inc., closing three meat plants this month. The controversy over the filler, which is made of fatty bits of beef that are heated and treated with ammonium to kill bacteria, shows how a simple nickname can forever change an entire industry.

In fact, beef filler had been used for decades before the nickname came about. But most Americans didn't know — or care — about it before Zirnstein's vivid moniker was quoted in a 2009 article by The New York Times on the safety of meat processing methods.

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The man of the house, Sokha, recently returned after nearly two years in captivity. His home is just as he left it: barren with a few dirty pillows passing for furniture. Slivers of daylight glow through cracks in the walls. The family’s most valuable possession, a sow, waddles and snorts beneath the elevated floorboards.

Before his December escape, Sokha (a pseudonym) was the property of a deep-sea trawler captain. The 39-year-old Cambodian, his teenage son and two young nephews were purchased for roughly $650, he said, each through brokers promising under-the-table jobs in a fish cannery.

There was no cannery. They were instead smuggled to a pier in neighboring Thailand, where they were shoved aboard a wooden vessel that motored into a lawless sea. His uncle had fallen for the same scam five years prior and escaped to warn the others. But Sokha told his son, then just 16, that this venture would turn out differently. He was wrong.

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Before you think this is a column merely about food, recognize that Pachirat's question isn't (only) about the immorality of the cheeseburger you had for lunch. It’s about the larger phenomenon whereby modern society has reconstructed itself to hide so many horrific consequences from view.

Calling this the "politics of sight," Pachirat's blood-soaked experience inside a slaughterhouse spotlights only the most illustrative example of how we've divorced ourselves from the means of producing violence -- and how, in doing so, we have made it psychologically easier to support such brutality. Sadly, billions of factory-farmed animals dying barbaric deaths are just one subset of casualties in that larger process.

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She says she doesn’t particularly like killing animals, but she does kill from time to time, if she has good reason. A deer invaded her garden and she killed it with a machete, and she sometimes nets fish in the surf near her home on the coast of Guerrero, Mexico. It’s a skill born from practice and necessity: She grew up rural and poor. Her father abandoned her family when she was 8, and her mother, Esperanza, had to find a way to support seven children. “We ate a lot of natural things,” she says. “Things from the forest.  My brother used to kill iguanas. I’ve got a good iguana recipe if you want it. It’s the best meat as far as I’m concerned. There are two types of iguana: green and black. The black is good to eat. The green is too beautiful to kill. Last winter I found a big black one in my house! Can you believe it? The way you kill them is you step lightly on their heads and then pull on the tail.”

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"We have a smear campaign going on against a product that is healthy and safe," Branstad said. "If they get by with this, what other food products are they going to attack next?"

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These days, our fears rest not on wariness about that new plant we just came across in the wild, but on fears about what has been done to our food before it reaches our tables. These are the natural result of the growth of a market economy that inserted middlemen between producers and consumers of food. In recent years the ways in which industrialization and globalization have completely transformed how the food we eat is grown, shipped, processed, and sold have helped ratchet up these fears much further.

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“Your grandmother always made this,” he said, stirring the bubbling brown stew and pinching in cumin. “I’ll teach you how to make it. Here, try it.” He raised the dripping spoon to my mouth. The mild tingle of cumin and the soft squish of beans lingered on my pallet, like a spicy fingerprint.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt the push and pull of growing up biracial in America. In the Mexican side of my family I was known as the white one. Even though I spoke Spanish, it was the formal kind learned from classrooms and reading, rather than the one you pick up by bartering with local shop owners over the price of firm avocados, or arguing with parents over a ridiculous curfew. On the other side, my cousins called me a “Wexican,” a white Mexican despite my similarly toned skin.

Cooking, however, taught me to channel my frustrations by creating foods through the addition of sour cream, cilantro, cayenne pepper and tender meat. I could make a food that doesn’t have to be Mexican or American.

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Although she’s recovering from a serious fall, she still bakes. I sample a slice of moist, honey-tinged rye, and she plies me with sugar-crusted oatmeal cookies. As we talk, she peels parsnips at the kitchen sink. She says she doesn’t understand the modern obsession with doing everything fast. She thinks something is lost in the translation.

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To be honest, I don’t know what that means. I mean, I know the difference between a pot of rice that I like eating and a pot that’s gluey, but there aren’t a whole lot of points between the two. And yet here is a man whose claim to fame among master chefs is that he makes rice better than the rest of them, and to accept that is to accept that there is a level of cooking that most of us will never comprehend. At some point, cooking is not a matter of skill; it’s a matter of understanding, of learning to see the differences between one perfectly good pot of rice and another, of the minute details in something that, for most anyone else, is pure pearly blandness. Truly great cooking is, in this way, first an act of learning to see, and then a striving to do. This is why, among chefs, the truism is that simple food is hard.

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On Monday, researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health announced that just a single serving of red meat per day dramatically increases your risk of death – by 13 percent. The odds of developing cancer or heart disease start around 14 percent -- and they climb even higher for people who eat processed meats like hot dogs and bacon. As MedSNBC summed it up, "Americans' love of meat likely accounts for about 1.5 million excess deaths every decade." Damn you, bacon.

It's just another blow for an industry with a reputation that's only slightly worse than Lindsay Lohan's. Despite the continued, relentless urgings that beef is "what's for dinner" and the shudderings of manly men like Herman Cain (remember him?) at the thought of a pizza piled with vegetables, meat consumption in America is on the decline. In fact, meat's had an image problem ever since Oprah declared she was through with burgers after the mad cow disease outbreak of the 1990s. The problem continues with the latest controversy over "pink slime" (beef scraps treated with ammonia) being served in our children's school lunches.

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A study conducted by the food company Unilever and the University of Manchester wanted to find out whether background sounds affect the perception of flavor. They found that people rated foods less salty and less sweet as noise levels increased. When noise levels decreased, the perception of those tastes increased. The results indicate that noise has a somewhat masking effect on taste. This is one of the reasons why airplane food doesn’t taste very good. The deafening roar of the engines can make the food taste less sweet and less salty (and possibly less other stuff, too, that these researchers didn’t test for).

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It required a six-week commitment to cutting out dairy, potatoes, gluten, wheat, rye, barley, all sugars, soy, corn, caffeine and anything refined. Then when your body is cleared, you reintroduce each food one at a time and take note of your reaction. Sort of like a science experiment.

“Oooh, no bread or cheese,” I said with a wince. “My staples.”

“I know.” She nodded.

“No anything,” I added. Yikes.

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On one hand, urban hipsters chugging Pabst Blue Ribbon beer in upscale dives dreamt of working-class authenticity, rebelling against high-class consumerism with aestheticized poverty. On the other hand, segments of the white working class — fans of the comedian Jeff Foxworthy’s self-mocking “You might be a redneck if ...” brand of humor — took tongue-in-cheek pride in the iconography of trailer parks, beer bellies, and kissing cousins meant to stereotype them.

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McMillan spent months exploring the American food system from three different angles: picking produce in California fields, working in two Michigan Walmarts, and expediting (organizing the flow of food from the kitchen to the dining room) at a Brooklyn, N.Y., Applebee's. By turns analytical and anecdotal, her book marshals first-person experience, history and current research to paint a picture of America's 21st-century food reality.

McMillan asks why the distribution of good, healthy food -- easy access to which she considers a human right -- is so often left to private companies, begging us to change the conversation from one about what people eat (she thinks that given the choice, people will eat relatively healthily) to one about healthy food's accessibility.

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Rare and exotic foods have favored positions in the canon of culinary aphrodisiacs. Consider the truffle, the piranha and the labor of harvesting a plate full of sparrow tongues. Foods from far-off lands have the spicy whisper of perilous adventure, and there’s nothing quite like a hint of mystery to stimulate the imagination. For example, Aztec concubines taught the conquistadors to drink hot chocolate; when the Spaniards carried the exotic substance across the sea to Europe, they brought with it the rumor that the drink was an aphrodisiac. And during the reign of Charles I, when rice was still a luxury in Europe, noble Casanovas swore by the improbable aphrodisiac of rice boiled in milk and flavored with cinnamon.

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Maybe it’s the Jersey. Tom’s dad was a New York cop, and his mom worked full-time as a nurse, yet somehow found the time to give four boys a good Catholic upbringing. “It was different in the city,” Tom remembers. “We were surrounded by family and other people who had tons of kids. Childcare was not an issue.” When Tom was 9 the family moved from the city to River Edge, N.J., where they lived in a close-knit neighborhood Tom describes as “very Irish and Italian, with some token Protestants.”

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Antibiotics are routinely given to livestock on factory farms to make them gain weight with less feed and keep them from getting sick in confinement conditions. But the daily dosing, at the same time it lowers feed needs, lowers drug effectiveness and produces antibiotic resistant bacteria or super bugs that can be deadly to people.

This month, researchers found 230 out of 395 pork cuts bought in U.S. stores were contaminated with a super bug called MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). Worse -- there were "no statistically significant differences" between "conventionally raised swine and swine raised without antibiotics," reported the researchers.

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Jan stands at the wooden kitchen island. She cuts neat circles from a rectangle of flattened dough. She is thin, with short graying hair and blue eyes that are at once friendly and shrewd. Her three granddaughters run screaming loops through the kitchen, and guests cluster around the bar inspecting the cocktail selection, but Jan seems unflustered by the crowd. She passes a platter of uncooked doughnuts to her son-in-law Lou, who mans a stock pot of bubbling oil.

As a general rule, I do not like doughnuts, but I make an exception once a winter. I’ve been attending the annual Kinney doughnut party since I was a kid. But it’s not just nostalgia that compels me to eat Kinney doughnuts -- the powdered confections are piping hot, with a texture that is at once pillowy and chewy. I wash down a chocolate-filled doughnut hole with a French75, and the winter months ahead seem to promise cozy cheer instead of dreary gloom. As Jan’s granddaughter Opal chases past me, I think of parties in this house when I was little, of eating doughnuts till I was sick, and of the year it actually snowed and a fantastic wooden toboggan materialized. I remember, as I often do, Jan’s son Japhy, who was two months older than me and a hero of my childhood.

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1. Clean;
2. Well-rested;
3. Impeccably dressed;
4. Well-versed in current events and prepared to deliver a handful of hilarious yet tasteful jokes on relevant topics; and
5. Ready to Dougie, if asked.

In reality, when Michelle came for lunch,

1. I hadn’t showered in two days;
2. I’d slept less than five hours each night for the previous three weeks, due to a recurring nightmare about burning risotto and disappearing pan handles;
3. I was in a carrot-spattered chef’s coat and oversize pants held up by a belt made of twisted Saran Wrap;
4. I hadn’t read a paper in weeks and felt comfortable conversing mainly about legumes; and
5. I’d spent the last week picking up heavy objects “properly,” according to a chiropractor, which required that I continually squat while sticking my butt out. As a result, I was unable to do a stiff-limbed waltz, let alone a shimmy.

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