Here are the simple facts: 14 year-old Ryan Hart of Jackson, Michigan was finishing up his Arby's roast beef sandwich last week when he bit into an non-traditional ingredient—"The fleshy, severed pad of an unfortunate employee's finger." It had been sliced off in a meat slicer. These things happen.

Are you super excited for the Great GoogaMooga festival in Brooklyn this weekend, where the chefs are the real rock stars? Fuck you.

In order to better address the needs of our fitness-obsessed readers, we are introducing this semi-regular column, "I of the Tiger," to take on the vital hardcore fitness issues of our time. Today: eat to win, but keep it to yourself. Dig it.

What do you think when you hear the word "Pepsi?" Chances are you think, "I guess if you're outta Coke, yeah that's fine. Do you have Diet Coke? No? Mr. Pibb? No? Forget it. Pepsi's fine." But what The Pepsi Corporation would prefer you to think is, "A kind of brown swill with amazing marketing!"

You would think that we Americans have conceived of every possible ice cream flavor on Earth. The ice cream aisle at your local grocery store occupies 40 percent of the total floor space, and that's before you get to all the Turkey Hill shit at the end of the aisle that's on sale because no one wants it. Famous ice cream shops like The Ice Cream Store have come up with flavors like Bacon, Booger, Mountain Dew, Caramel Popcorn, Motor Oil (which really does taste like motor oil), White Wine, Sweet Corn, and more. And fancy pancy restaurants love to present you with all kinds of ice cream with crazy ingredients like fennel dust and foie gras and eye of newt and whatever the fuck else makes them sound innovative.

CNN.com featured a report Monday about a new website called Invite For a Bite that's dedicated to creating cheerful archipelagos out of sad, lonely women-islands who feel awkward eating alone.

Last week, French McDonald's franchises announced a new addition to their menus: the McBaguette sandwich, a Frankenstein's monster of culinary culture clash.

Three people in Brazil killed and ate at least three women as a ritual of their religious sect. The cannibals, who have confessed to the crime, say that a voice told them to kill evil women. It's unclear if the voice also told them to use the extra human meat to stuff empanadas, which they then sold to their unwitting neighbors.

Unwrap your lips from your processed Cheez-Delivery Snack'm Tube-Brand Corn Snaxxx and pay attention, America. This is important. Sure, you've been doing your best to consume your annual 137-gallon allotment of high fructose corn syrup, and your 92 pounds of Cheez annually. But do your standard condiments contain a sufficient amount of saturated fat and artificial flavors? Or could you be doing more?

One of the most delightful products of our industrial farming system is "pink slime," aka "lean, finely textured beef," a slurry of ammonia-treated cow byproducts mixed into ground beef as a filler. It's widely used in school lunches because growing children should get three servings of slime-based food per day. But now schools are ridding their cafeterias of pink slime.

Soda sales here in the U.S. of A were down again last year. We're back down to—get this—1996 levels of soda consumption.

After one week of viral stardom Marilyn Hagerty, the 85-year-old North Dakota restaurant critic famous for her polite review of the local Olive Garden, is rebelling against her new fanbase of disaffected New Yorkers. Have we pushed our beloved Marilyn too far?

Americans are eating less meat—12% less than five years ago. That's good news. Not only for sweet Bessie The Cow, whose mama will not be killed (quite so soon) by a bolt gun shot to the skull, but also for you, the intrepid herbivoracious culinary explorer.

Today is the national launch of Taco Bell's newest bit of God-defying food sodomy, the "Doritos Locos Taco." The inside is your standard Taco Bell Taco; the outside, a hard taco-shaped Dorito. I had some today — to assist Gizmodo's Sam Biddle for his review — and now I'm going to give you the lowdown.

This morning, 86-year-old Marilyn Hagerty's Olive Garden restaurant review for The Grand Forks Herald titillated the internet. "I don't get it," Marilyn said of the world's fascination with her earnest quest to evaluate the ubiquitous chain restaurant with a standardized menu.

The recently-opened Olive Garden in Grand Forks, N.D., is off to a great start, according to Marilyn Hagerty, longtime food critic for the Grand Forks Herald. The restaurant "is the largest and most beautiful" in town and has been patronized by visitors "from out of town as well as people who live here," Hagerty reports in yesterday's positive review.

Watch out, American™ Cheez™—there is a new flavor of cheese "in town" that people are eating a lot of! That would be pepper jack—a fiesta of flavor in your mouth area due to the mixing of peppers inside of the cheez. It's not just hungry Americans shoving entire bricks of pepper jack into their drooling maws during their voracious Ambien-fueled sleepwalks—it's on Chik'n™ sandwiches too!

NPR's The Salt blog picked up on a very NPR story about a Seattle public plot turned "food forest," where citizens will be encouraged to make friends with one another while frolicking and foraging for luscious, free fruits.

Today in the New York Times, restaurant critic Pete Wells compares eight well-regarded New York City burgers — leaving us to wonder, if these are the best burgers in New York, which is the worst? We want to find out. But we need your help.

Last night, the AP broke the news that the New York Police Department had spent months spying on Muslims in Newark, N.J. "The result was a 60-page report," AP reporter Adam Goldman writes, "containing brief summaries of businesses and their clientele." But was it a surveillance file... or just a guide to Newark's best Muslim restaurants?