Sunday, January 13, 2008

Polvos Pinós

A deal:

We will admit to ignorance when it comes to this, if the world will admit that—whatever it is—it is awful. Disgusting and awful.

Polvos Pinós is only the first mystery here. In Spanish, it means "pine powder" (or, even stranger, "pine powders"), but we have no idea what to make of this arcanum.

Yes, the basics are plain enough. Mama Pig and Baby Pig leave the mercado, and its debonair, suit-wearing proprietor, with a great big sack of the stuff, and they couldn't be happier. Baby even pulls along behind him a wheeled toy: a corpulent mother hog shoveling Polvos Pinós into her baby's fat little face.

Self-saucing pigs, we've seen. And self-grinding pigs. But these are the first self-fattening pigs we can remember.

Still, what is it? Are there clues? What about there, in that inset circle? Two pigs weighed on the scales. The sinfully scrawny pig in the right-hand tray skulks above the legend "sin polvos pinós." But on the left-hand tray! In the left-hand tray sits a handsome hog basking in the glory of his girth. He is labeled "con polvos pinós." (Of course, this was before advertisers learned to harness the awesome explanatory power of the bar graph.) So what have we learned? When pigs eat this stuff, this pine powder (or smoke or roll around in it), they get nicely fattened.

Perhaps Polvos Pinós is merely a delicious treat? Pigs are renowned for their healthy appetites, after all, and this could simply be an after-dinner sweet marketed at the pig demographic. But… no. We don't believe that any more than you do. We have seen far too many tokens of suicidefoodism's putrid promise to believe anything so innocent.

Indeed, as this second advertisement claims: Polvos Pinós has the power to "give admirable results in all animal classes." All classes, it would seem, except for chickens. The ghastly chicken corpse hanging over the scene like a shroud has hardly achieved an admirable result. Unless Polvos Pinós is meant as a poultry poison?

No! It is happy pig feed, and pigs happily gobble it up, so that they might reach their target weight and prove themselves in the only way "food" animals can.


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I do hope someone comes up with the contents of these powders - I assume Pinós is the trade name. They would have saved the chicken's life, according to the second advert - are they some sort of supplement, or worm powders or what? Someone tell us!
Great work always, Suicide Food - it's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it.................

Anonymous said...

The dead chicken is captioned by: "Polvos Pinós would have saved him." If only he'd been fed this miraculous flour, he could have lived to die another day. At least he would have been food instead of just a dead chicken.

Anonymous said...

In the first half of the XX century , Spain was mostly a farmer country and big part of the them worked in these kind of things. Obviously , having a bigger demand on products related to it and adverticers happy to announce them.

To dont make the story too long , is just powders made with another dead animals parts ( sheeps and baby cows mostly ). They had a type of plant too , so the animals would eat the double , wich made them more fat and " healthy " + they would be more fat sooner and sooner they would be on the market. So yes , its powder made of dead animals and for animals to get fatter and dead SOONER.

BY THE WAAAY - Dont get confused - the powder itself doesnt make them fat , they just eat the double of normally they would. And about the chicken , I guess it died of hunger or something , I dont really get the message but im sure is not poison.

Here you can read it ( only if you know spanish btw ) : http://www.cultura.mecd.es/promoArte/MC/animalario/detallePieza_idPieza23.html