It's fucking astonishing. America decides, for one of the first times ever, that a close examination of what a fast-food chain is serving is warranted. And they decided to throw a shit-fit about Subway's "Footlong" sandwiches being eleven inches long sometimes.

A half-second of thought from anyone who's ever been to Subway twice and this thing would have disappeared like a fart in an empty football stadium. This, of course, did not happen.

As you may know, over at YAD, I had a hosting drive to pay for the small but not insignificant annual hosting costs of my two sites. It was wildly successful, and so I feel just guilty enough to recommit to more content on Forkbastard. Specifically, more ranty stuff. Also more cooky stuff, but there's a lot of stuff I kept telling myself I'd get around to ranting about last year that I never did. So expect more of that in 2013.

And since it's a new year, let me offer a New Year's Resolution to all of America. STOP FUCKING EATING DORITOS LOCOS TACOS ALREADY.

I've noticed a bit of backlash around the Intenet regarding a Mark Bittman article in the New York Times entitled "Fake Chicken Worth Eating".

In it, he extolls, to a limited extent, the virtues of an extruded, soy-based chicken breast substitute from Savage River Farms. As an example, here's Tristero from Hullabaloo:

Let's get this out of the way right up front. I don't ever want to eat human breast milk ice cream. There are plenty of other mammals in the sea, as it were, and I find the ice cream made from their breast milk to be perfectly acceptable. And I find the recent trend of cooking with human breast milk to be stunt cookery and nerdish obsession with sourcing of the highest and most pathetic order.

But the government really, really does not need to be going into British ice cream shops and confiscating the stuff.

So there's been a lot of news and talk online because of a lawsuit from an Alabama law firm. You see, they've sued Taco Bell. They want Taco Bell to stop calling their taco beef "taco beef" because they claim the taco beef is only 36% beef.

What's in the rest? Well, again, these are just claims, claims hotly (if somewhat weaselly) denied by Taco Bell. But the claim is that the rest is fillers like oats, soy, yeast extracts, and various spices.

If you're anything like me, you probably spend between 30 and 45 minutes of any given day contemplating the various ways the human race is bringing about the end of civilization, its own extinction, or both. Luckily, Ive developed a time-saving shortcut that can reduce this task to five minutes.

Just go to Google News and search on "bluefin tuna". It doesn't matter when you search on it. Today's as good a day as any. Then read the headlines and first sentences. Then weep for the species. Both of them.

I should just start right off the bat with this description of a sandwich, from the Daily Illini.

"...four cheeseburgers, a double cheesesteak, a pork roll, a chicken cheesesteak, sausage, gyro meat, and grilled chicken, and then move on to demolish mozzarella sticks, chicken fingers, bacon, chicken nuggets, macaroni and cheese bites, fried mushrooms, jalapeno poppers, pizza bites, onion rings, hash browns, mini corn dogs, American cheese, ketchup and mayonnaise. All sandwiched between two rolls."

So I've got good news, and I've got bad news.

The good news? Those awful fucking commercials, the ones where two completely fake people argue about high fructose corn syrup, and the pro-HFCS dude totally schools the anti-HFCS lady? Those haven't worked.

Bagged salad is a necessary evil.

There are things I don't like about bagged salad. Like paying three bucks or more for 20 cents worth of lettuce. Like that weird smell when you first open the bag, probably from whatever they fill the bags with that isn't oxygen to keep the lettuce from going bad so fast. The fact that I could, if I really, really wanted to, buy lettuce and chop it.

This is what Burger Kings are going to look like soon.

No, really.

The good news is, is should be fairly inexpensive for franchises, as they can pick up everything they need from a Target clearance aisle three years ago. The bad news is, once they make the mandatory upgrade, they're going to have to stare at this all fucking day long.