The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is trying to do just that.

Led by Neal D. Barnard, the nonprofit PCRM shares similar goals with PETA: the promotion of veganism for the benefit of both health and animal rights. And lately, it's had something else in common with it -- attention-getting stunts. Where better to pick a fight than the heart of dairy country, with a big billboard near Lambeau Field, home of the Green Bay Packers, featuring a cheesehead grim reaper. The sign warns football fans that "Cheese can sack your health. Fat. Cholesterol. Sodium." Don't forget deliciousness!

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 "Natural Beauty" answers that burning question once and for all, "What would you look like if you put on a year's worth of makeup all at once?"

2. "District 9" ... with robots

Kibwe Tavares' short film "Robots of Brixton" imagines a world where sentient machines are given inhuman treatment by humans. An interesting memorial to the 1981 Brixton riots.

3. Joey Chestnuts, official winner of Nathan's Famous hot dog eating contest

For the fifth year in a row, Joey "Jaws" Chestnuts won Nathan's annual hot dog-scarfing contest in Coney Island. 

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Do you:

A) Call back the restaurant and ask for a refund;

B) Just eat the food and promise to deal with it next time;

C) Call the police

If you answered C, you are not alone. A woman in Savannah, Ga., called 911 to rectify her dinner order yesterday. This was the result:

Sadly, these kinds of calls aren't as uncommon as you might think. In March 2009 a woman called the police after being given the wrong order of McNuggets at McDonald's.

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And while this grievance might not seem new, exactly, CAI is launching another campaign on Thursday against Ronald McDonald himself, whom the watchdog group called a "Deep Fried Joe Camel." They claim Ronald's the equivalent of a drug pusher for MSG-addicted kids.

But how "friendly" is Ronald? A new study done by outside marketing group Ace Metric found that in a survey group of 500, an overwhelming amount found a guy with big red lips and white greasepaint more creepy than cute.

McDonald's refuses to give up on Ronald, though, and its defense on why it needs to keep a terrifying clown as its mascot would be charming if it weren't so ridiculous and backward. Below, five of the responses McDonald's has given for keeping Ronald on the payroll.

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An intriguing premise! Who knew that there was bad blood between the geeks and the locavores; or that hackers were manning the barricades against the baleful influence of Michael Pollan and Alice Waters? I certainly didn't, and out where I live, in Berkeley, Calif., I find it a challenge to shop for organic scallions without bumping into half a dozen iPhone app writers and  free-range, vegetarian-fed egg connoisseurs. Usually, everyone is very nice to each other, (although, it is true, some of the older hippies can get grouchy when you block them from easy tofu-counter access).

But Heffernan sees culture war!

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Following in Hawaii's footsteps, Washington, Oregon and, most significantly, California have introduced statewide legislation that would make it illegal -- and highly fineable -- to serve or even possess shark's fin. (Hawaii's law calls for fines of $5,000 to $15,000 for even first-time offenders.)

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Myers' invective against food obsessives in the March issue of the Atlantic, "The Moral Crusade Against Foodies," drips disgust with us. (And again, I use "us" loosely: Is MFK Fisher the same as the guy who takes his iPhone on bacon-eating dates?) He shows his contempt by starting the essay with an illustration of our, er, earthiest selves. He quotes the casually transgressive Anthony Bourdain suggesting that cooking should be encouraged with something approaching physical force. He cherry-picks a bit from chef/writer Gabrielle Hamilton, in which she likens chicken entrails to "bloody jewels." And then he follows with a sentence from journalist Kim Severson that begins, innocuously enough, "What blessed entity invented sugar and cacao pods and vanilla beans ... ?" Well, Myers finger-wags, that tells you that food lovers obviously have neither real God nor grace.

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You want more? The friendly Cleveland congressman filed suit against a number of companies that supply and run the congressional eatery, because in 2008 he bit into a "sandwich wrap" of some kind and hurt his teeth on an olive pit.

According to the suit: "Said sandwich wrap was unwholesome and unfit for human consumption, in that it was represented to contain pitted olives, yet unknown to plaintiff contained an unpitted olive or olives which plaintiff did not reasonably expect to be present in the food prepared for him, and could not visually detect prior to consumption."

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The first Summit of the Horse is drawing many advocates who say ranchers and horse owners should be allowed to slaughter their animals and revive the nation's shuttered horse processing industry.

Bureau of Land Management chief Robert Abbey is expected to address the conference late Tuesday to discuss problems created by growing populations of feral horses. But he has said he does not support euthanasia.

Congress ended the killing of horses for human consumption in 2007. Slaughter supporters say horse meat is already safely consumed in dozens of countries.

Animal rights groups plan to protest the summit.

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9. Food politics, and we don't mean Michael Pollan

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If fish can be heroes, salmon have a heroic story -- returning after years out in the world, they fight their way upriver back to where they were born, slipping past eagles and dodging bears to find a place for their children. But the natural order is both grislier and more beautiful than that. Those eagles and bears will stave off their hunger and snatch their fill of fish from the water. And the salmon that survive will spawn, wither and then die, their bodies nourishing the ecology with nutrients collected from the ocean.

Bristol Bay, Alaska, is home to the largest wild salmon run in the world. Every summer, up to 50 million sockeye come pounding through the bay, turning it silver. The salmon run is what brings life back to this place. It defines it. "It's incredibly moving to see the first fish surge," Kate Taylor, a wilderness guide, said to me. "That's when everything starts. You see the bald eagles come out, the osprey, the wolves, the bears. Soon, you see trout up the river feeding on the salmon eggs. All this life starts to come out of this barren landscape." And then there are the people: the fishermen gearing up for the season. The natives who have subsisted on this fish for nearly 10,000 years. The thousands of workers who come here, swelling these villages to 20 times their off-season size.

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Salmonella and its discontents

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My parents were surprised and dismayed; I came from a typical American meat-and-potatoes family -- we were Lutheran, after all. Some of my favorite foods growing up included Spam, sliced ham slathered in barbecue sauce, and hamburgers without the bun. As for vegetables? I mostly hated them, except for raw carrots, celery (preferably as a vessel for peanut butter), canned corn or canned green beans. My definition of salad was iceberg lettuce sprinkled with sugar. I especially hated onions and mushrooms, largely due to my father's insistence that I would like them if I tried them.

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I think the feeling I felt at that moment could be called excitement. For years, since the day I found myself hurling invective toward people freaked out by fish served with their heads on, I've been saying that meat eaters should have to kill their dinner at least once. "Meat is animals. You can love eating it, but you're not allowed to forget that," I said, with no small amount of self-righteousness. Of course, I'd never done it myself, and I've eaten many times my body weight in meat since then. So I looked forward to absolving myself of hypocrisy and, I figured, who better to walk me though it than Shelby? He grew up on a farm. He has a tattoo of pigs and chickens circling his arm, and he has the thick, powerful hands of a man who seems comfortable with any kind of labor. He's the kind of friend who makes you stand up a little straighter because you don't want to feel like a wussy around him.

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The Mongols were brutal and pragmatic and mobile. I was self-indulgent and listless, but now suddenly obsessed with their stories. When I arrived in Mongolia as a Peace Corps volunteer two years later, it was with a rucksack full of romance, too little long underwear, and a hunger. Mongolians ate horses, and I wanted to join them. I wanted to ingest some history and culture. Perhaps I did a little too much reading.

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As a cook and meat eater, I don't ask myself these questions often enough, and I, too, had occasion to really think about them when I recently killed my dinner for the first time. I'll explore some of my thoughts in an essay on Friday. The flavor, I have to admit, was delicious, but the feeling was much more complicated than that.

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Competitive eater Joey Chestnut has held on to his title at the annual July Fourth hot dog eating contest at New York's Coney Island, but one of his biggest rivals tried to crash the celebration and has been taken into custody.

Chestnut chomped down on 54 hot dogs in 10 minutes on Sunday to win the annual Nathan's International Hot Dog Eating Contest for the fourth year in a row.

Watching from the crowd was six-time champion Takeru Kobayashi (tah-KEH'-roo koh-bah-YAH'-shee), who has not signed a contract with Major League Eating to be free to compete in contests sanctioned by other groups.

But Kobayashi went on stage after the competition. Police officers grabbed him, and he tried to hold onto police barricades as they took him into custody.

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First, the good news: The Dietary Guidelines may not mean a whole lot to the average consumer, but they deeply influence decisions made by school and institutional food services, federally funded feeding programs like Meals on Wheels, and food labeling. As our friend Dr. Ayala described in her blog, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee recently released its report, officially recommending a steep drop in sodium intake; a smart, realistic move toward encouraging people to rely less on abstract ideas like recommended daily allowances (put away your nutrition calculators! Wait, you don't have one either?) and to think in more big-picture diet patterns, like Mediterranean or vegetarian diets; and, most intriguingly, it actually addresses the systemic access issues behind much of our obesity problem:

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Yes, Freedom Fries (and Freedom Toast and Freedom Kissing), we're looking at you. But we're certainly not the only ones to have taken the low road here. Get ready for international hits like Mecca Cola and Empire Biscuits -- a feast of jingoistic fervor.

View the slide show

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