Food marketing is psychotic. It creeps. Smithsonian magazine ran a cover story with the headline How the Chicken Conquered the World. "Let us now praise chicken in all its extra-crispy glory! Chicken, the mascot of globalization, the universal symbol of middlebrow culinary aspiration!" That was last year. "Nothing is more worthless than an individual chicken," Joy Williams once observed. Not for Smithsonian. Obviously there was some war going on and the chickens kicked our ass.

It’s not just the birds. For a character in Francesco Pacifico’s novel The Story of my Purity, the place of psychosis is apricot pastries: "Industrial apricots had become humanity’s enemy number one, [...]

Is this the world's meatiest sandwich? Sure, why the hell not.

Here's an important advance in the war against obesity: "Rather than tucking into a bag of potato crisps, consumers will be encouraged to dip their hand into a packet of crisps made of pulverised beef or turkey crisps. Thin, crunchy, high in protein and low in fat, the bizarre invention is being developed in a laboratory in North Yorkshire as a healthy alternative to a bag of fatty cheese and onion flavoured crisps." But… how would it happen?

"Meals containing too much processed meat such as cheap ham, bacon and sausages could send you to an early grave, a large-scale study has found."

"Eating red meat is associated with a sharply increased risk of death from cancer and heart disease, according to a new study, and the more of it you eat, the greater the risk…. each daily increase of three ounces of red meat was associated with a 12 percent greater risk of dying over all, including a 16 percent greater risk of cardiovascular death and a 10 percent greater risk of cancer death. The increased risks linked to processed meat, like bacon, were even greater: 20 percent over all, 21 percent for cardiovascular disease and 16 percent for cancer."

Are you ready to cook me some big meat? Maybe you're not! Here, we will tell you what to buy to make the magic happen.

Labmeat! "Scientists have figured out the riddle of growing meat in a laboratory and are now just working out how they can make it profitable, it has been claimed." It is worth clicking through to see the infographic on the process: Apparently they take a cow and turn it into Stella D'Oro Swiss Fudge cookies, which then become moustache-shaped bacon slices and are finally turned into burgers. The future is SO now.