You mentioned the $42 kobe hamburger in NY the other week. Kobe cows are massaged daily and fed large quantities of beer.

http://www.foodreference.com/html/artkobebeef.html

I'd love to try some Kobe beef sometime but I'm generally way too thrifty to go to the kind of restaurant that serves it.

While I have been known to visit steakhouses that serve Kobe, I haven't ordered it yet.

When I was in Philly last year during basketball playoffs, I went out to a nice steakhouse with some friends. In honor of the game that night against the Lakers, the specials the were a 76 oz steak or Kobe beef.

Just saw an item in the Wall Street Journal today -- "...Kobe beef is back on menus here (the U.S.), but a few things have changed. It isn't being liquored up or rubbed down anymore, and it's a third the price. What explains the shift? The USDA currently bans imports of Japanese meat because of a mad-cow outbreak there. Your Kobe beef is far more likely to hale from Boise, Idaho, than Kobe Japan."

I remember hearing about that on NPR; apparently that surplus junkfood used to go to people in shelters.