Yes, meat is meat. And all the more reason to go vegan

Paul Shapiro wrote a wonderful op-ed about the new face (or lack thereof) of meat of the future.

My own city, Cincinnati, has the (dis)honorable distinction of having once been the world center of slaughtering pigs — before Chicago held the title. Cincinnati still carries the nickname of Porkopolis.

As a lover of etymology, I am amazed that folks don’t understand that the word meat refers simply to solids — such as nut meats. The slaughterers of animals have butchered the word itself. In the Bible, the word meat referred to food!

The biggest hurdle with respect to getting people to eat plant-based meats seems to be necrophagia, the disease that compels otherwise normal people to chew on decaying flesh. Only this strange addiction can explain how someone, with all of the alternatives to slaughtering animals now available, is not a vegan in 2019.

Jayn Meinhardt, Cincinnati Ohio

Trolls know no bounds

How ignorant and appalling that people would post stupid comments on social media about Illinois State Trooper Brooke Jones-Story, who was killed by a semi-trailer truck as she stood on the side of a road doing a truck inspection. The commenters blame her or call her a road pirate for stopping vehicles. Say what?

How stupid are these people? And how can a driver not see a police vehicle — its emergency lights activated — stopped on the shoulder of a roadway?

Trooper Jones-Story was doing her job, inspecting a truck to make sure it was safe to operate on the road. She was making the road safer for other vehicles.

God bless Trooper Jones-Story and her family.

John Moravecek, Naperville

We cut our losses with Smollett

Talking heads can’t seem to stop obsessing over the lack of perfect justice in the case of Jussie Smollett. The financial cost of a trial — with pretrial motions, hearings on the motions, salaries for judges, prosecutors and other court personnel, as well as court appearances by police officers and detectives — would have been throwing good money after bad.

Yes, this fiasco was costly. But it wasn’t a dreadful idea to cut our losses.

If we really want a more fair criminal justice system, we should abolish the plea bargaining system.

Nancy E. Albert, author of “Your Rights When Stopped by Police” and former author/editor of Illinois Law Enforcement Officers Law Bulletin