Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Kin Folk BBQ Sauce

The animals have found a way to draw the death-and-dying process out. Instead of the quick hop onto the grill, they can luxuriate in the fragrant spray of barbecue sauce, letting it seep into their every pore, soothe their every ache. Frolicking, spooning the tangy lather over themselves, enjoying a drink, they lounge. Like debutantes making the most of their own anticipation, they linger in the slop. While the coals heat up and ash over, our bathers let all their cares slip away.

What's got us so interested isn't the same familiar glimpse into the minds of suicidal "food" animals. No, it's the tagline.

"We may all be different, but in the end we're all kin!"

That is some profoundly poignant wisdom. Profoundly poignant and thoroughly, horribly, irredeemably revolting.

Indeed, when the animals have been killed, plucked (in the chicken's case), skinned (in the case of the cow), butchered, marinaded, grilled, and eaten, they really are just kin, indistinct members of that great family of death. It is only in death where they achieve their authentic identity, that of faceless, featureless nonbeings.

That they celebrate this fact! That it comforts and amuses them! We suspect brain damage.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you include the reader/eater's perspective there are two alternative messages in the tagline:

1) An implied anti-suicide food message: "Humans are the same too" In other words, we are all kin with the animals therefore shouldn't be eating them; or

2) A more disturbing reading: "Humans are the same too" therefore it is also OK to eat humans. The animals in the oven will gladly scooch over and make room for Uncle Jeb or Aunt Cecilia or even for YOU. That's what we mean by "KIN FOLK BBQ Sauce".

-Toby Schnauzer
Folk Etymologist (and Folk Eater?)

Duckduck said...

omfg, this is real??

Are they supposed to be bathing in bbq sauce? Looks more like blood. Because, you know, nothing can get my appetite going like the sight of silly animals bathing in their own hemorrhaging.

OK, and am I insane or has that cow just ripped the drumstick off his still-living chicken friend, and he is now brandishing it like he intends to assault the pig?

Kimberly said...

Actually, I think the cow is holding a brush, you know, a basting brush . . .