Eggs, like dairy, are on the periphery of our mandate. Not animals, they are nevertheless linked to animals (obviously) and created by the same agrindustrial complex as meat. So while we haven't spent a lot of time on eggs (or dairy products, for that matter), they are ever on the edges of our awareness.While chicken eggs aren't alive, nor are the supermarket versions the preliving form of some autonomous individual, still, this is troubling. For eggs—no matter their provenance—represent life. Beginnings. Possibility. The finite, precious, and potent force within us all.
But here, they're just props for an advertisement for cooking spray. And what little regard they have for themselves! They exist solely to be consumed. Or destroyed. Either way, they don't care. Life is cheap for eggs. They'll kill themselves out of spite if you refuse to eat them the right way.
Can you make out what the ringleader is saying? Her words pack the sting, the gleeful hostility, of a ransom note:
Cook me in PAM® or my friends will throw themselves at your house!Don't you see? Everything craves death. Actual animals do. Their trimmed flesh and extracted organs do. And now we learn that eggs do as well. Everything, including eggs, longs for the sweet oblivion of eternity.
It even fills their dreams.
(Thanks to Dr. Natassja for the PAM referral and photo, and to Dr. Zena for the "dreaming billboard" referral.)
5 comments:
Yes, I remember when that billboard was current...it's sort of akin to having a picture of a baby happily picturing its wizened, dessicated older self as a corpse in a satin-lined coffin, innit?
That's beautiful, Desdemona.
It's nothing like a baby. A baby is a potential life of its own. An unfertilized egg is not. It never will be. It is no more life than a pool of semen drying on your gym sock.
I would think you would be more concerned with the prison-camp-like conditions where *eggs are made* and the living breathing chickens that are exploited to produce them than this.
This post is two steps away from Operation Rescue. Do you believe in a woman's right to choose? in men's right to masturbate?
(Hint: If not for the system that produces these eggs, we wouldn't care one way or another. If eggs dropped from trees in the cool of an autumn evening, we'd think one and all would be free to do with them as they wished. It's only because they are the products of hellish conditions that we object. We would have believed this subtext to be so apparent as to require a blindfold to miss.)
I totally understood what you were saying, Ben, but I could see why people who don't know much about veganism might not. They might think, "Oh, come on, vegans won't eat eggs because they represent potential life? I should have known it would be some goofy hippie thing." (Enough morons are already convinced that eggs are somehow "chicken abortions"!)
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