This is a very true claim. However, the basic requirements for utility (food, shelter) are included in nominal GDP, so a drastic blow to it would conceivably inhibit both measured and unmeasured utility.

I tell this story not to win your pity but to illustrate a point: I’ve been vegetarian for a decade, and when it comes up, I still get a look of confused horror that says, “But you seemed so … normal.” The U.S. boasts more than 10 million herbivores today, yet most Americans assume that every last one is a loopy, self-satisfied health fanatic, hellbent on draining all the joy out of life. Those of us who want to avoid the social nightmare have to hide our vegetarianism like an Oxycontin addiction, because admit it, omnivores: You know nothing about us. Do we eat fish? Will we panic if confronted with a hamburger? Are we dying of malnutrition? You have no clue. So read on, my flesh-eating friends—I believe it’s high time we cleared a few things up.

SOME relationships run aground on the perilous shoals of money, sex or religion. When Shauna James’s new romance hit the rocks, the culprit was wheat.

“I went out with one guy who said I seemed really great but he liked bread too much to date me,” said Ms. James, 41, a writer in Seattle who cannot eat gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye.

Sharing meals has always been an important courtship ritual and a metaphor for love. But in an age when many people define themselves by what they will eat and what they won’t, dietary differences can put a strain on a romantic relationship. The culinary camps have become so balkanized that some factions consider interdietary dating taboo.

The slaughterhouse and its owner, owned by Westland Meat Co., are major suppliers of beef to the Agriculture Department’s school lunch program.

Video footage released yesterday shows workers at the slaughterhouse repeatedly violating anti-cruelty and food safety rules by electrically shocking cows too sick or weak to stand on their own, using forklifts to roll cows on the ground in an effort to get them to stand up, and shooting high-intensity water sprays up their noses.

The footage was taken by an undercover investigator for the Humane Society of the United States and is evidence the USDA inspection and enforcement of the rules need enhancement, officials with the group said