Make no mistake, we are animals here at the food blog! Animals! Grrr. We only recently added chef Chris Cosentino to our list, thanks to his offal dinner for Anthony Bourdain and Mary Ladd a couple weeks ago, and already he's delighting us and making us queasy. A friend told me a story once about his young (4 or 5 years old) daughter who was watching the movie Babe fairly regularly. "Daddy," she said, "I don't want to eat the animals--but they taste so good!

And now that we have indulged our baser instinct for blood and guts (literally), before everyone jumps onto the comments (HA! That's funny on so many levels this week) and gets snippy with each other, let us remember that we are all rational, thoughtful adults. In order to help this process, we have a few summer reading lists that people can peruse at your leisure. Albion looks at what the world is eating, while Celeste has the tale of an international book swap for Six Records of a Floating Life. . . For more intellectual pursuits, head over to A Full Belly, where Lia has some tips on meal-planning.

Bacon Press has some delish stories about the fresh hell that is fast-food service in the South. When you're ready to leave the fast food behind, may we suggest something a little more, civilized? Or go roam wild in the fields. And if all else fails, get a little drunk on a tiki happy hour.

Pic is from Simply Recipes recipe for blackberry shortcake, which made me want to lick the screen