Everybody Must Get Stones

“In the dead of night at a slaughterhouse in Brazil’s southeastern farming belt, a group of men splattered in blood gathered around the entrails of a cow to see if they had hit gold. ‘Just look at the size of that,’ one worker said as he pressed the animal’s flesh through a sieve to reveal a hardened dark orange lump almost as big as a golf ball, glistening under the fluorescent light. There it was: a gallstone.” WSJ (Gift Article): Cattle Gallstones, Worth Twice as Much as Gold, Drive a Global Smuggling Frenzy. “A prized ingredient in China’s $60 billion traditional medicine industry, gallstones have become the must-have item among underground traders and armed robbers in Brazil.”