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Boozy. Watermelon. Slushie. We just strung together what are arguably the three greatest words in the English language and turned it into one tall drink that will refresh you on the hottest of summer days — and help you get your buzz on any day of the…

HOPEDALE, La. (AP) — Fisherman Randy Slavich drags a clunky metal net through an underwater oyster bed in Lake Machias, a brackish body opening into the Gulf of Mexico. For generations, this has been a bountiful lake for harvesting oysters, long before millions of gallons of oil spilled off Louisiana’s coast in 2010.

On this day, Slavich’s cage-like net pulls up dozens of empty, lifeless oyster shells.

“It’s not good,” he said, shaking his head as he pushed the shells back into the water. “We’ve never seen it like this, not out here.”

Gulf Coast oyster harvests have declined dramatically in the four years since a BP PLC oil well blew wild in the nation’s worst offshore oil disaster. Even after a modest rebound last year, thousands of acres of oyster beds where oil from the well washed ashore are producing less than a third of their pre-spill harvest.

Most worrisome to Slavich is the dearth of oyster larvae — future generations of oysters — once found in abundance on shells in the lake, east of the muddy bends of the Mississippi River.

Whether the spill contributed to the decline is part of an ongoing study; hurricanes, overfishing and influxes of oyster-killing fresh water had already put pressure on the industry.

“To the extent that oyster populations are down, data from government studies have indicated it is likely due to other conditions,” Geoff Morrell, a BP senior vice president, said in a statement.

The millions of gallons of oil that spewed into the Gulf caused fishing grounds to be closed for fear the oil and the chemical dispersant used to break it up would make seafood inedible, either by direct ingestion of the substances by marine life or by tainting the food chain. More visible were the oil-covered dolphins, birds and other sea life that either died in the oil or required rescue and scrubbing to clean away the oil.

But whether the spill crippled spawning and swimming oyster larvae that had not yet settled onto oyster beds isn’t yet known, said Thomas Soniat, an oyster biologist at the University of New Orleans.

A BP “white paper” states that Louisiana biologists did not find any oil on the oyster beds they checked in 2010, 2011 or 2012. The paper also said the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s checks on oysters after the spill either found no hydrocarbons or levels far too low to cause health problems.

Louisiana’s 2010 assessment of oyster stocks, cited as a source, noted that oil wasn’t found on beds that were always submerged, even in areas where oil hit nearby shorelines.

Regardless of the cause, the harvest is way down, and prices are way up as a result.

Louisiana has historically accounted for about half of the Gulf oyster harvest and about a third of U.S. production. The state has more than a dozen naturally producing public oyster bed areas along its coast, occupying more than 1.6 million acres of Gulf bottom.

Louisiana’s public reefs typically would produce anywhere from 3 million to 7 million pounds of oyster meat a year. In 2010 and 2011, production dropped to barely 2 million pounds, then nosedived to just 563,100 pounds in 2012 before rising to 954,950 pounds last year.

Mississippi and Alabama, where some oil washed ashore during the spill, also had very poor oyster production since 2010.

“It’s pretty disturbing,” said Chris Nelson, owner of Bon Secour Fisheries Inc., an Alabama-based dealer that buys oysters from all five Gulf Coast states.

Nelson noted that Louisiana oyster prices before Hurricane Katrina were $25 or less per sack. Prices climbed to about $30 after hurricanes Katrina, Gustav and Ike, and shot up to more than $40 per sack after the oil spill.

Prices now range from $45 to $62 per sack, depending on quality — and that’s “with many oysters being sold in smaller-sized sacks,” Nelson said.

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Associated Press writer Janet McConnaughey contributed to this report from New Orleans.

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Follow Stacey Plaisance on Twitter at https://twitter.com/splaisance .

When people talk about using chemicals on the farm, oftentimes they use the word “pesticides.” To people outside agriculture, pesticides tends to be the catch-all category for any and all chemical compound we spray on our crops. And honestly, that is…

Charleigh Matice lost her appetite when she found a swastika made from butter on the bun of a chicken sandwich at McDonald’s.

Matice says she discovered the unappetizing symbol while putting mayo on a sandwich purchased at a McDonald’s in Morehead City, North Carolina.

“Is this a joke? Does somebody really think they’re funny?” Matice told WCTI-TV. “Many people died because of that symbol and it’s not something that should be taken lightly. It’s not something that should be thrown around.”

It was especially offensive to Matice, whose grandfather fought in World War II.

Although McDonald’s employees offered to replace the sandwich, presumedly with a bun not alluding to Nazi atrocities, Matice declined.

“I really didn’t have an appetite at that point so I said I rather have my money back,” she said, according to ABC News.

But Matice wasn’t satisfied with just the money, so she contacted McDonald’s corporate headquarters about her swastika bun beef.

Shortly after her complaint, she received a letter from Dulcy Purcell, the owner of the Morehead City McDonald’s, stating that the employee who allegedly put the swastika on the bun has been fired.

“We do not tolerate that kind of behavior at McDonald’s, and it’s not what we stand for personally as owners,” Purcell wrote, according to UPI.com. “It is about providing the best level of service and care to our customers, and anything less than that is unacceptable to us.”

Matice has since accepted the apology and plans to eat at McDonald’s again.

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There’s no shortage of horror stories about fast food: Chicken nuggets made out of bone-carcass-chemical goop; minced beef for tacos that resembles slabs of poop; sausages crafted from the blood and guts of pigs; a hamburger patty that looks exactly the same after sitting around for more than a decade.

In a food universe where the label “100 percent [insert name of preferred meat]” doesn’t necessarily mean what we think it does (makers of the controversial “pink slime,” for instance, have insisted that the product is “100 percent beef“), the actual contents of the meat products served at fast-food restaurants is sometimes a big mystery.

To highlight this gruesome phenomenon, visual artist Peter Augustus has launched a new project entitled “Mystery Meat,” in which he presents popular fast-food items — but with a deliberate (and grisly) twist.

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Augustus, who was born in Texas but now resides in Hong Kong, says it was, in part, his new home that inspired him to start thinking about food in a different way. “Arriving in Hong Kong for the first time, a city overloaded with visual stimulation, one of the most impactful scenes for me was the meat shops found in my neighborhood of Sai Ying Pun,” he wrote in an email to The Huffington Post. “[In the West] most of us seldom see anything that even closely represents what kind of animal we are eating when we purchase it — it is always pre-packaged, nice and neat, showcased in an air-conditioned supermarket. Being forced to pass by these meat shops on a daily bases [sic] with their pig heads, intestines, eyeballs and hearts hung on hooks out in the open led me to challenge myself to view these shops as a normal place where actual food was being sourced every day, that ended up in my meal at a local restaurant.”

In his “Mystery Meat” project, which is ongoing, Augustus says he hopes to explore what seems to be the disconnect between many people in the West and the food they consume. His aim is to challenge viewers to think twice about where their meal has come from. “[With these photos] I hope to cause the viewer to take into account what the natural form of their food looks like. I think the work highlights a number of important debates, and it is not meant to be repulsive — just to raise awareness,” he said. “It also touches on the longstanding debate of the quality of chicken and meat products and the use of unnatural fillers and hormones in the animal products we eat daily.”

As for Augustus’ own eating habits, he told HuffPost that while he does eat meat, he avoids fast food. “I seriously doubt that the executives at America’s beloved chains actually eat their own products,” he said.

Augustus added that working on this project has definitely changed the way he approaches meat in his own life. “I now make an effort to know where and how the animal I am eating was raised and the results do dictate if I end up eating it,” he said. “Not to sound preachy, but I think if more meat eaters did that, I think there would be less animosity from overly passionate vegans.”

Morning meals are traditionally packed with empty calories. But substitute a few ingredients and you can enjoy the same tastes and textures with fewer carbs, more protein, and just as many pancakes.

My team at Men’s Fitness has compiled a list of ea…