Read a book some people would like to ban, ...

... a cookbook.

A War on Good Taste, 31 Dec. 2010, Wall Street Journal

You see, the Barefoot Contessa is peddling disease and ruin, having published one of the unhealthiest cookbooks of the year.

Or at least that's the story published in a number of newspapers, thanks to columnists reprinting the "findings" of a "report" put out by a Washington activist group that styles itself the "Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine." A spokesman for the group denounced Ms. Garten and other celebrity chefs, such as Gordon Ramsay of "Hell's Kitchen" fame, for using "some of the worst possible ingredients." Among the poisonous compounds enumerated? Butter and cream.

I'm not in favor of unlimited butter and cream.  To be healthy, we 'just' need balance, in our food and in our lives (not always an easy thing to do).  

I'm also not in favor of mistreating food-production animals, but perhaps a good life on a well-maintained family-type farm would be preferable to no life at all (not that the non-existent animals would know)?  Or maybe I just like a world in which there are nosy brown-eyed cows gathering along a fence to watch any out-of-the-ordinary event (such as a person walking along the road).  Without a use for these cows, it's unlikely that humans would go to the trouble of keeping them around and we'd crowd them out like we do the other earthlings for which we have no specific use.

I don't own any of Ina Garten's cookbooks, and my cookbook shelves are over-full, but I may have to make room for one more.