Sorrento Lions Club Boucherie Festival

It's a party in honor of butchery (boucherie), so naturally pigs are on hand to celebrate! Only in a world where suicidefoodism holds sway could that make a glimmer of sense. And yet we have endured hundreds of examples of this very worldview.

At the Sorrento (Louisiana) Lions Club Boucherie Festival, weary travelers can satisfy their hunger with any number of pig-based products. Roast pork and pig ribs, of course, but that goes without saying. And because this all takes place midway between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, relentless consumers can also indulge in (in ascending order of horror) pork jambalaya, boudin sausage balls, cracklins, and hog head cheese. Is it any wonder the pink pig has flipped his cap in ecstatic expectation? He knows that every last scrap of him will be put to "good" use, and really—isn't that all any animal needs?

In an almost unheard-of gesture, the Festival also has offerings for those "who cannot eat pork." We confess that we assumed such people would be excluded outright, and subjected, perhaps, to public humiliation.

The Festival features more than just foodstuffs crafted from guitar-playing pigs: art booths, carnival rides, a parade, and (brace yourself) a beauty pageant, wherein Miss Boucherie is crowned. That's right: Miss Butchery! We catch ourselves snickering, and then we grow silent, shamed by our own incomprehension.

And finally, also from the Festival's website, is this endearing, yet ghostly, image (see right). In it, a pig, possibly the joyeux strummer from above, beside a cajun chopping block.

Is he dead, the ax having already done its blessed duty? Or—as we believe—has he merely fainted in bliss at the prospect of arriving in that boucherie in the sky, there to be killed over and over, world without end?






Addendum: Among other prizes, Miss Butchery will walk home with a "septar" and "nice gift's" (sic).