Accidental Gun Control: Bullets Get Expensive

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RACHEL MARTIN, host:

Hey there, welcome back to the Bryant Park Project from NPR News. We are always online at npr.org/bryantpark. We here at the BPP, we're an equal opportunity kind of news conglomerate. We're all about the grassroots, the democracy, the people. This is your chance, people. We talk about what you've been emailing to your friends, talking about online. We wrap it up and deliver it to you in a segment that we call The Most.

(Soundbite of music)

MARTIN: Mike Pesca.

MIKE PESCA, host:

I bring you first The Most from Channel 2 in Baltimore, your name for news, I'm assuming is their motto. And they did one of these stories where they looked at all the food that the restaurants say doesn't have very many calories and they did some testing, and it turns out oh, that food had lots of calories. It was one of those where all the other ABC affiliates get in on the act and do their own riffing on the same set of facts, but let's hear what Channel 2 Baltimore had to say about some of this supposedly calorie low - low-in-calorie food.

Unidentified Woman: Order of Macaroni Grill's Pollo Magra, Skinny Chicken, tested 522 calories more than advertised, and 43 more grams of fat.

PESCA: Forty-three!

Unidentified Woman: Number two on the list, Chili's Guiltless Grilled Salmon. It's hardly guiltless. The menu reads 480 calories and 14 grams of fat. The lab we used found the salmon had 664 calories, 35 grams of fat in our serving.

MARTIN: What? Frying it in lard and sugar-coating it?

PESCA: I went to all the different stations, man, they love that guiltless chicken. Channel 7 in Baltimore said, they should feel guilty. Everyone did their own little riff on that. So they nailed them, Channel 2, hats off to you.

PATRICIA MCKINNEY: I'm having trouble manufacturing outrage about this. It's not that - it's news you can use.

MARTIN: It depresses me.

JEANNE BARON: It's false advertising.

PESCA: Also - one of the things they did was they tested the bread and butter that you could get with the meal, along with it. Turns out, butter has a lot of fat.

IAN CHILLAG: Butter is high in butter?

BARON: Wow, OK.

PESCA: Thanks a lot, science guys. Jean, what have you got?

BARON: A tin-plate portrait of Maggie Thatcher - it's a 14-foot high, tin-plate portrait of Maggie Thatcher - is causing a stir in Wales. An artist has put it up inside the glass facade of the assembly in Wales next to another 14-foot portrait of a prominent figure in the Labor Party, Nye Bevan.

Now, Nye Bevan was responsible for the National Health Service that England is so famous for, and there are some assembly members in Wales who say it is an insult to the people to put up a portrait of Maggie Thatcher. The artist is defending the choice, though. He says, more than virtually any other politician, these two have had an influence over the lives we all lead in Wales, and he has some good company. Other assembly members say it belongs there.

PESCA: Maggie Thatcher, the Iron Lady, in tin.

BARON: In tin!

PESCA: Ian.

MCKINNEY: I call her Margaret. But that's just me.

PESCA: You're very formal.

MCKINNEY: I am.

MARTIN: Ian, what do you have to say?

CHILLAG: Well, I have a most-viewed from the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming, one of my favorite papers. And this story is about prairie dogs - killing prairie dogs.

(Soundbite of music)

CHILLAG: Sorry, any opportunity to use that piece of sound.

MARTIN: Dramatic prairie dog.

CHILLAG: OK, there's a - it's the fifth annual prairie dog killing contest...

PESCA: Contest?

CHILLAG: That they're holding. Yeah, because think about it. Prairie dogs, you know, they have the holes, they pop up out of the ground, you know.

MARTIN: A real-life video game.

CHILLAG: Shooting them would be fun if, you know, you didn't kill them or you were using rubber darts, because it's basically like a video game. They pop up, or like the Whack-A-Mole.

MARTIN: Yeah, whack a mole, whack a dog.

CHILLAG: Except it's shoot a prairie dog. So this, as you might imagine, is stirring up a little of what we call controversy. People are very upset, they say that this is inhumane. Wyoming allows...

PESCA: What, the prairie dog apologists?

CHILLAG: Well, actually, there's a group called the Prairie Dog Coalition that's in opposition to the Prairie Dog Posse, which is a sort of support group for people who like to kill the prairie dog and feel like, you know, they've been treated unfairly.

MARTIN: A support group?

MCKINNEY: They feel they're misunderstood.

PESCA: Also, Jay-Z's original rap group.

CHILLAG: Yeah. In addition, one thing I thought was interesting is apparently, on these shoots, these guys are using these non-jacket hollow-point bullets, that's the popular bullet, and these...it's really gross...

PESCA: They're cop-killer bullets is what they are.

CHILLAG: Well, prairie dogs, for sure. The term they use is they mist the prairie dogs, they basically like, blow up the prairie dogs and these bullets separate into these sand-sized particles of lead. So any scavenger - a hawk that might come along and eat the prairie dog is going to get lead poisoning. So it has a larger kind of ecological consequence.

PESCA: That's a great - I mean, not a great thing to happen, but a fascinating story. Tricia.

MARTIN: Tricia.

MCKINNEY: I have a story about ammo, too, but I'm going to do that one second. My first one...

PESCA: You've ruined the segue.

MCKINNEY: Yeah, I've ruined the segue. Number one on Google Trends this morning, Hamilton Jordan. He is a former political strategist, and an aide to Jimmy Carter, President Carter, who died yesterday after battling cancer for 22 years.

MARTIN: Carter didn't die.

MCKINNEY: Hamilton Jordan died, excuse me.

PESCA: The pronoun should refer to the last proper noun, which is what Rachel's saying.

MCKINNEY: Pardon me. Well taken. So apparently, Hamilton Jordan had various forms of cancer over the last 22 years, and he just died yesterday. He'll be - there will be a memorial service for him on Friday. He's known - he was a key figure in President Carter's 1976 presidential campaign and he's credited with conceiving the strategy of having Carter campaign in early states, you know, targeting every state, but especially the ones that vote early in the primaries. And later, he went on to work for Ross Perot.

PESCA: Yes, so, Carter won Iowa, and this is what made him - because Iowa wasn't even a big deal then, so it traces all back to Hamilton Jordan.

MCKINNEY: And my second story is one of the most-emailed at msnbc.com. This is the ammo story. The headline, "Rising Ammo Costs Pinch Gun Owners." And basically, it's all about the price of metal, it's shooting up there, excuse the pun, and it's actually affecting people who buy bullets and bullet casings.

So, apparently the price of assault rifle ammunition has jumped from 80 dollars a case of a thousand rounds two years ago to 250 for a similar case today. Nine-millimeter shells have jumped from 10 dollars to 17 dollars - that's quite a bit - and it's affecting police forces who have to buy ammo. But I know somebody that's probably happy about this. That's Chris Rock.

(Soundbite of movie "Chris Rock: Bigger & Blacker")

Mr. CHRIS ROCK (Comedian): You don't need no gun control. You know what you need? We need some bullet control. We need to control the bullets, that's what I think. I think the bullets should cost 5,000 dollars. Five thousand dollars for a bullet, you know why? Because if a bullet cost 5,000 dollars, there would be no more innocent bystanders.

MARTIN: I'm sorry, but I think Chris Rock is a modern-day prophet. That man is wise beyond his years.

PESCA: My favorite Rodney Dangerfield bullet joke is, I grew up in a tough neighborhood, tough neighborhood. They wouldn't shoot you, they'd go up to you and push the bullet in.

(Soundbite of laughter)

PESCA: Matt.

MARTIN: Try to follow that, Matt Martinez.

MATT MARTINEZ: I will. One of the most-emailed at NPR right now at the most-viewed list is a story by NPR's Ketzel Levine. She usually talks about plants and all things gardening.

PESCA: She's the Doyenne of Dirt.

MARTINEZ: She is. But this time, she took up meat, made-in-the-lab meat. The headline is "Lab Grown Meat, A Reality, But Who Will Eat It?"

MARTIN: Pas moi.

MARTINEZ: Yeah, yeah. Here's Ketzel Levine.

KETZEL LEVINE: I've had easier stories to tell, certainly more bucolic ones. I'd much rather describe cows grazing in meadows than their cells being grown in labs. In fact, even though the idea has been kicking around for a century, it has never seemed a good time to talk about man-made meat. But it's had some famous proponents, including that pragmatic carnivore Winston Churchill, who in 1932, more or less, said this.

Mr. BRIAN FORD (Author, "The Future of Food"): How strange it is that we have to culture and grow a whole chicken when all I want to eat is the breast meat. The time will come when we'll be able to culture all the chicken breasts that we wish without having to sacrifice a single bird.

LEVINE: I say more or less, because that was a British biologist paraphrasing. We'll meet him shortly. Anyway, Churchill was paraphrasing, too, likely inspired by the work of Alexis Carrel. At the time of Churchill's comment, Dr. Carrel had been keeping alive a cultured piece of chicken heart tissue for 20 years. It wasn't overflowing the sides of his bathtub or anything, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist kept the tissue fresh and small. But his experiment, which outlived him, fed many an imagination.

Mr. FREDERIK POHL (Coauthor, "The Space Merchants"): My name is Frederik Pohl and with Cyril Kornbluth, I wrote the book called "The Space Merchants."

LEVINE: In that 1952 sci-fi novel, tissue-cultured meat gets a starring, if inglorious role. It's the starter ingredient for an ever-growing lumpen food source known affectionately as Chicken Little.

Mr. POHL: (Reading) This is her nest, he said proudly. I looked and gulped. It was a gray-brown rubbery hemisphere some 15 yards in diameter. Dozens of pipes ran into her pulsating flesh. You could see that she was alive.

LEVINE: Yum. It turns out that Frederick Pohl, now almost 90, suspected his novel wouldn't stay science fiction long.

Mr. POHL: Actually, when Cyril and I wrote the book, I thought we would see much of it actually happening. Sliced chicken from the delicatessen is probably a lot like the Chicken Little meat would look.

LEVINE: Most carnivores don't fear deli meat, nor do they spend much time at all worrying about where their meat comes from. So pity the maligned scientist who, to no one's applause, is knocking himself out this very minute to grow tissue-cultured meat. Yep, it's a happening thing in labs from Norway to North Carolina and it's being done exactly the same way we already grow patches of human skin. All that takes is a skin cell marinated in a nutrient-rich concoction, and within a few weeks, it's pretty much ready to wear. According to Brian Ford, our former Churchill, and author of "The Future of Food," we can culture bits of all sorts of distinct tissues.

Mr. FORD: And meat is a complex mixture of tissues. Under the microscope you can see all sorts of gristly bits, fatty bits and muscly bits and it's this sort of mosaic of different cell types that changes cells into what we know as meat. And that is a problem that nobody has successfully, as yet, addressed.

LEVINE: But somebody is getting close.

Dr. VLADIMIR MIRONOV (Cell Biology and Anatomy, Medical University of South Carolina): I personally believe this is inescapable future. That's the short answer.

LEVINE: Vladimir Mironov is a biologist at the Medical University of South Carolina and among that handful of scientists culturing meat from animal tissue. Dr. Mironov's long answer involves turning formless, textureless patches of the stuff into mass-produced form, like meat sheets, or what we might call affectionately shmeat. What stands between Dr. Mironov and shmeat right now is production models, production facilities, venture capital, oh, and consumer demand.

Dr. MIRONOV: Does people want it? Does market ready? That's the main question. Technology I think is doable and if you have reasonable investment, it can be done, but the question is, you can't create product which nobody wants to buy, or it's too expensive to buy. So the right timing, timing is everything.

LEVINE: OK, so, is this the right time? One unlikely nonprofit says yes. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, PETA recently announced a million-dollar contest to create commercially viable chicken meat sacrificing neither chicken nor egg. The deadline is 2012, the contest rules Herculean, and the prize money paltry, but the thinking is pragmatic. If people must have meat and factory farming's an animal nightmare, why not find a high tech alternative? Which brings up one last point, the taste of shmeat. Chicken, right? Not so, says a source who has sampled tissue-cultured turkey. It tasted like turkey.

MARTIN: Oh, Ketzel.

PESCA: That's NPR's Ketzel Levine. You can find the link to this story and all the stories you heard on The Most online at npr.org/bryantpark.

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